[Generation_online] Post-WTC Empire Review

[Soenke Zehle]

Post WTC review of Negri/Hardt's "Empire" from London Review of Books
posted by hydrarchist on Monday October 01, @06:30AM
from the interesting-liberal-slant dept.

"You can't build a new society with a Stanley knife"

by Malcolm Bull, published in The London Review of Books

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n19/bull2319.htm

Forget Bob Geldof, Bono and the other do-gooders, Genoa's only significance
was as the latest battle in the war of Neoliberalism. It was a clear victory
this time for the 'anarchists'. Damaging property and street fighting proved
the most effective forms of protest, and provoked an over-reaction from the
police: they shot a man armed with a fire extinguisher and raided the
headquarters of the Genoa Social Forum for no reason. Non-violent
demonstrators like to claim that the 'anarchists' have hijacked legitimate
protest, but that is not historically true: the Black Bloc were there to
greet Reagan when he came to Europe in the 1980s, long before many of the
other groups represented at Genoa were formed.The Tute Bianche ('white
overalls') are a more recent and distinctively Post-Modern phenomenon,
committed to the deconstruction of the opposition between violence and
non-violence, but they, too, have roots in the autonomist movements of the
1970s. Demonstrations of this kind have been going on for a long time, and
they are unlikely to stop. The only thing that seems uncertain is who is
fighting on which side.


I am not referring to the rumour that the Black Bloc has been infiltrated by
agents provocateurs, or the counterclaim that the Tute Bianche have started
to co-operate with the police. The issue is more fundamental. Since the end
of the Cold War, Neoliberalism has become so ideologically dominant that it
is no longer clear whether the real Neoliberals are the leaders of the G8 or
the people outside in the balaclavas and the overalls. Take Ya Basta!, the
Italian group formed in 1996 in support of the Chiapas uprising, and a
driving force behind the Tute Bianche. They are fighting under the slogan
'per la dignità dei popoli contro il neoliberismo', but their two key
political demands, free migration and the right to a guaranteed basic
income, are policies that were once largely the preserve of Neoliberal
think-tanks in the United States. The idea that everyone should be paid a
basic income, irrespective of any other income they have coming in, or of
their willingness to work, has a long history on the Right. In the early
1960s, Milton Friedman came out in favour of one form of the idea, and in
Britain it has circulated at the margins of Conservative politics for half a
century, being espoused most recently by William Hague's friend Alan Duncan.
Support for free migration has also come mostly from right-wing
libertarians, and in the early 1980s was the sort of topic that found an
airing at Liberty Fund seminars. For Neoliberals one of the attractions of
these policies was their incompatibility with the welfare state. Basic
income was the cheap alternative to welfare, a direct repudiation of 'to
each according to his needs' (it allows for the total removal of social
security infrastructure); free migration, which would make a nation's
welfare benefits accessible to everyone in the world, would quickly make the
hard-won achievements of the welfare system unsustainable.

Just because the 'anarchists' espouse bits of the Neoliberal agenda that
even George W. Bush has not yet got to does not mean they are pursuing
Neoliberal ends. In Italian autonomist politics, the idea of a guaranteed
income developed in the early 1970s not as a means of cutting the welfare
bill, but as part of the effort to uncouple productive labour from the
capitalist economy. As for free migration, it is as natural an outgrowth of
left-wing internationalism as it is of right-wing libertarianism. Still, we
should be wary of interpreting the violent confrontation at Genoa as the
clash of incompatible ideologies. Although it originated from a Marxist
analysis of the class struggle, the conception of autonomy which inspired
the Autonomia movement in Italy and the Autonomen of Germany and Northern
Europe has come substantially to overlap with the Neoliberal ideal of
negative liberty. The initial move looked revolutionary: since Marx had
shown that social relations were not, in fact, the seamless web of bourgeois
mythology, but rather the battlefield of economic conflict, the class
struggle could be waged more effectively if the working class disengaged
from waged labour and sought autonomy for itself. In the Italian context,
the ideal of autonomy also represented the reverse of the PCI's historic
attempt to achieve hegemony through the domination of civil society. By
seeking the leadership of the capitalist state, the PCI was merely helping
to support it: autonomous action, independent of unions and party, would
sever the working class from capitalism, and without labour to sustain it
capitalism would collapse.

In practice, autonomy meant that action once considered relatively marginal
to the class struggle, like squatting or the 'refusal of work' - wildcat
strikes, calling in sick, knocking off early, acts of petty theft and
sabotage - became paradigmatic examples of the 'self-valorisation' of the
working class. At first, these actions were part of a strategy for effecting
revolutionary change, not (as in anarchism) an attempt to realise a new
social ideal. But they soon became ends in themselves, and throughout the
1980s autonomism survived chiefly in neo-tribal squatters' colonies like
Kreuzberg in Berlin and Christiania in Copenhagen. The repoliticisation of
the movement was partly due to the success of the Zapatistas. Their
'autonomous municipalities' and their struggle to affirm an alternative
politics independent of the state provided a new model for all who wanted to
live outside the capitalist system. At the same time, the very fact that
people in remote parts of the world had to fight to establish that autonomy
served to illustrate capitalism's new global reach. However, a shift had
taken place: autonomy had been intended to replace capitalism with
Communism; but as the antithesis of globalisation it functions very
differently: autonomous areas or spheres of activity may constitute local
alternatives to capitalism and so limit its extent, but they are not
incompatible with its continuation. In terms of political theory this is
significant: 'immunity from the service of capital' (as Hobbes might have
put it) is one, today perhaps the most important form of negative liberty,
and autonomous regions and basic incomes are both ways of making it
possible, whereas neither autonomous zones nor basic incomes have any place
in Communism, for both are ways of limiting the demands that people can make
on each other.

It is this intellectual and political context that makes the appearance of
Empire so intriguing. Recently released on parole from Rebibbia prison in
Rome, and an acknowledged influence on Ya Basta!, Antonio Negri has
unimpeachable revolutionary credentials. In the 1970s, he was the leading
theorist of Potere Operaio and later of the Autonomia movement. But in 1979,
the kidnapping and execution of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades gave the
Italian authorities the pretext for the indiscriminate repression of the
extra-Parliamentary Left. Thousands of activists were arrested on political
charges; Negri himself was accused of masterminding acts of terrorism, and
of being the unidentified voice on the line in a phone call to Moro's wife.
There was no hard evidence to substantiate any of these accusations. The
pentiti accused Negri of complicity only in one action and that was more a
hideously bungled prank than an act of terrorism: in the 'kidnapping' of a
Potere Operaio supporter by his friends to extract money from his wealthy
parents, a chloroformed handkerchief was held for too long over the young
man's face. Nevertheless, Negri was sentenced to prison, only to be released
under Parliamentary immunity when elected as a Radical MP. Escaping to
France, where he had the support of Deleuze and Guattari, he continued his
academic career in Paris (Michael Hardt was a student) until 1997, when he
voluntarily returned to Italy to serve out the remainder of his sentence.

Negri's attempt to retheorise the autonomist strategy began during his first
spell in prison, with a study of Spinoza. He found in Spinoza a distinction
(lost in English translations)between potentia ('strength', 'force',
'creative activity') and potestas ('authority', 'command', 'sovereignty').
According to Spinoza, God's power (potentia) is his essence, and what we
conceive to be in his power (potestas) necessarily exists. For Negri this
does not just mean that since God is necessarily creative his creation, too,
is necessary; it subordinates potestas to the continuing actualisation of
potentia: God's sovereignty over the world is, in reality, nothing other
than his world-making. The political import of this distinction emerges in
Spinoza's unfinished Political Treatise, where, Negri claims, the multitude
becomes 'a productive essence' and the potestas of the sovereign is the
potentia of the people.

Here, the old autonomist strategy of disengagement from existing structures
of authority found a new justification. The proletariat may have given way
to Spinoza's multitude, and the language of economics to that of
jurisprudence, but the basic point was unchanged: taking power and making
power are the same thing. The revolutionary potential of this idea was
affirmed in Insurgencies (1999), where Negri pointed out that the English
and American Revolutions had been inspired by just such a doctrine: the
republican theory of liberty, with its emphasis on the constituent power of
the citizenry. In the brief passage 'from resistance to revolution, from
associationism to the constitution of political bodies . . . from militiae
to the armies' was the proof that potentia could become potestas overnight.
All that Marx had needed to add to what J.G.A. Pocock called the 'Atlantic
republican tradition' was the idea that the political always includes the
social. Now, 'political space becomes social space,' and with creative free
labour as its subject, constituent power is 'the revolution itself'.

In Empire, this argument is applied to globalisation. The new world order
represents a new form of imperial sovereignty 'composed of a series of
national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule'.
The account of the way these organisms - the United States, the G8, the UN,
the NGOs, the multinationals and the media conglomerates - exercise their
authority is left rather vague, but in a sense it doesn't matter. Empire,
like other forms of sovereignty (imperium in Spinoza), is only the power of
the people writ large. In globalisation, alternatives to capitalism are not
defeated so much as given new opportunity to work on a global scale: 'The
creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of
autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political
organisation of global flows and exchange.'

It's easy to see why Empire has proved the most successful work of political
theory to come from the Left for a generation. Not only is it written with
unusual energy, clarity and wit, but it addresses directly the central
political issue of the moment: the perceived distance between ordinary
people trying to live in the way they want and the systems of power that
defeat them. By simultaneously redefining globalisation as a form of
sovereignty and recasting the autonomist project in the republican
tradition, Hardt and Negri offer an exceptionally optimistic analysis of the
problem: remote as it may seem, sovereignty is nothing that a few
like-minded peoplecannot create for themselves. Today's anti-capitalist
protests may look like mob violence, but that is half the point: the street
mobs made America, too; this is counter-Empire in the making.

Nevertheless, the structure of counter-Empire remains obscure. Hardt and
Negri distance themselves from those who merely want to 'defend the local
and construct barriers to capital'. But although their reinterpretation of
autonomy involves more than freedom from the constraints of the market, it
is still recognisably part of the late 20th-century reworking of liberalism.
Negri's rediscovery of republican thought in the early 1980s paralleled that
of Quentin Skinner in Britain, and the retrieval of Anti-Federalism by
libertarians in the United States. In no case did this involve repudiation
of the idea of negative liberty, just a renewed emphasis on the point that
people can be free only if they also have an ongoing capacity for
self-government. For Skinner this meant a call to active citizenship, while
for Negri it involved a reaffirmation of the Anti-Federalist view that the
constituent power of the citizen is not irretrievably transferred to the
sovereign through some contract or constitution. The constituent power of
the multitude is inalienable; it remains, as Negri writes in Insurgencies,
'an irresistible provocation to imbalance, restlessness and historical
ruptures'. Counter-empire is permanent revolution.

This is not the Marxist revolution to which Negri was once committed.
Although hailed by Slavoj Zizek as 'The Communist Manifesto for our time',
Empire is more Jeffersonian than Marxist. Like those who invoke The
Declaration of Independence against the Federal Government, Hardt and Negri
focus on the contradictions generated by liberalism's global sovereignty:
the nuclear bomb (a standing affront to militias as well as to pacifists),
the continuing existence of immigration controls, the reliance of global
business and media interests on government support and regulation.
Cheerfully appropriating the slogans of national Neoliberalism for use
against global Neoliberalism, Hardt and Negri proclaim: 'Now that the most
radical conservative opponents of big government have collapsed under the
weight of the paradox of their position, we want to pick up their banners .
. . It is our turn now to cry: "Big government is over!"'

With its repeated affirmation that we don't have to accept the world as we
find it, and that we can remake it to suit ourselves, Empire is certainly
inspirational reading. But what, if anything, it might inspire someone to do
is hard to say. Because Hardt and Negri's version of republican liberty is a
theory of power rather than of rights it doesn't easily translate into talk
of duties. (Unlike Skinner, they can't call for laws forcing us to exercise
our rights.) Furthermore, their analysis of power is not one that lends
itself to judgments about the way it should be exercised. Both these
difficulties are inherited from Spinoza, whose theological metaphysics
dictated that, since all power is God's power, power must be co-extensive
with natural right. In a state of nature everyone has as much right as they
have the power to exercise, limited only by the antagonistic power of
others. The formation of the commonwealth involves no transfer of natural
right to the sovereign (as in social contract theory), merely an aggregation
of power, and thus of right, that increases the power of the commonwealth
over nature and over the individuals within it. Civil right is natural right
and natural right is power. As Negri puts it in Insurgencies, 'the law
precedes the constitution, the people's autonomy lives before its
formalisation. It is the Tartar who founds freedom, in the experience of his
own right.' 

The belief that civil right is unalienated power is fundamental to Negri's
rethinking of the autonomist programme. But as many commentators have
pointed out, Spinoza's theory licenses tyranny as much as democracy,
counter-revolution as well as revolution. Whoever exercises sovereignty has
the right to do so for as long as they have the power to maintain it. By
replacing Marx with Spinoza, Negri preserves the revolutionary creed at the
expense of its justification. For Spinoza, there is no point at which either
the individual or the multitude is alienated from something that is
naturally or rightfully theirs, so no one has any claim to power that they
do not happen to possess. If someone develops larger muscles, buys a bigger
gun, or stages a successful revolution, power and right are redistributed
accordingly. That is all there is to it.

Spinoza, it's no surprise to discover, is Henry Kissinger's preferred
political philosopher. Whether he is Mrs Thatcher's favourite as well, I
don't know, but on Negri's reading he ought to be. For Spinoza, too, 'the
bourgeois ideology of civil society is only an illusion' and there is no
such thing as 'an intermediate moment in the process that leads from the
state of nature to the political state'. The concept of 'multitude' that
Negri derives from Spinoza is therefore as much a repudiation of civil
society as it is a substitute for the old idea of the 'masses'. According to
Negri, nature constructs individuals,and then, through co-operation, 'an
infinite number of singularities are composed as productive essence.' The
political is 'a multitude of co-operating singularities' coextensive with
the social but not mediated through it. If civil society withers away, so
much the better; the true structure of sovereignty is then laid bare.

Whether Hardt and Negri can actually manage without a more nuanced and
autonomous conception of the social is another question. They object to
social contract theorists who pretend 'that the subject can be understood
presocially and outside the community and then impose a kind of
transcendental socialisation on it'. The dialectic between the civil order
and the natural order is now at an end, they argue,'all phenomena and forces
are artificial' and so 'no subjectivity is outside.' But if there is 'no
more outside', how does that leave the claim that civil right is the
aggregated power which individuals enjoy in the state of nature? Where there
is no difference between the natural and the social, the distinction between
the social and the political becomes all the more important. For what is the
role of constituent power if sovereignty is always already constituted?
Where now 'theTartar who founds freedom in the experience of his own right'?

Ironically, one response to these questions may be found in Spinoza himself.
It is not at all obvious that Negri's interpretation of Spinoza is correct.
In the Theologico-Political Treatise Spinoza had maintained that some sort
of social contract was necessary and that natural right was transferred. In
the Political Treatise, the contract disappears, but whether its elimination
means the continuation of natural right in the civil state or the elision of
the difference between the civil and the natural is less certain. Spinoza
sometimes says the former, but he also emphasises that in the state of
nature where 'the natural right of man is determined by the power of every
individual, and belongs to everyone . . . it is a nonentity, existing in
opinion rather than fact.' Only on entering the commonwealth does natural
right become more than a fiction: 'men in the state of nature can hardly be
possessed of their own right.' On this interpretation, civil right is the
only form of right there is; in the state of nature there is so much risk
that men are virtually powerless againsteach other; far from taking their
unalienated power into the commonwealth, they experience it there for the
first time. For man, the social animal, if not for God or nature, potestas
creates potentia.

It would, I think, be difficult for Hardt and Negri to turn their argument
around in this way. Although they recognise the function of society in the
production of individual subjectivities they barely acknowledge its role in
the production of power. Using Foucault's model of biopower, they argue that
power constitutes society, not the other way round: 'Power, as it produces,
organises; as it organises, it speaks and expresses itself as authority.' In
reply to Machiavelli's observation that the project of constructing a new
society needs arms and money,they cite Spinoza and ask: 'Don't we already
possess them? Don't the necessary weapons reside precisely within the
creative and prophetic power of the multitude?' No one is powerless; even
the old, the sick and the unemployed are engaged in the 'immaterial labour'
that produces 'total socialcapital'. Sounding a bit like Ali G, they
conclude: 'The poor itself is power. There is World Poverty, but there is
above all World Possibility, and only the poor is capable of this.'

It is difficult to see how this analysis comprehends the reality of
powerlessness. You may be able to threaten the world with a Stanley knife,
but you cannot build a new society with one. Insofar as the problems of the
powerless have been addressed in recent years it is often through a dynamic
thatworks in the opposite direction to the one Hardt and Negri suggest.
Their response to globalisation is to maintain that since we have not
contracted into global society, we still have all the power we need to
change it. The alternative is to argue that a geographically boundless
society must also be a totally inclusive society. The latter is an extension
of what used to be called the politics of recognition. Globalisation may
have replaced multiculturalism as the focus of contemporary political
debate, but there is an underlying continuity: the concern of
anti-globalisation protesters with remote regions of the world, with the
lives of people unlike themselves, and with species of animals and plants
that most have seen only on TV is predicated on an unparalleled imaginative
identification with the Other. This totalisation of the politics of
recognition from the local to the global is what has given momentum to
campaigns such as the one for African Aids victims; here, it is a question
of sympathy rather than sovereignty, of justice rather than power. In many
cases, unless the powerful recognised some kinship with them, the powerless
would just die. Capitalism has no need for the 'immaterial labour' of
millions now living. For powerless human beings, as for other species,
autonomy leads to extinction.

The conflict at the centre of the movement against global capitalism is the
tension between its libertarian stance and the demand for global justice.
Although Hardt and Negri are pro-globalisation and anti-capitalism they
belong firmly in the libertarian camp. The 'postmodern republicanism' they
advocate expresses the 'multitude's desire for liberation' through
'desertion, exodus and nomadism'. And although, in his most recent work,
Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo, Negri has written a series of meditations on
poverty almost Franciscan in tone, the political theory he has developed
over the past twenty years lacks the tools to deal with it. The assertion
that the political is identical with the social cannot disguise the fact
that his is a theory conceived entirely in terms of the former. As Hannah
Arendt once noted approvingly of the American Revolution, this was a fight
'against tyranny and oppression, not against exploitation and poverty'.

For Arendt, it was the other sort of revolution, motivated by compassion
rather than the desire for freedom, that led inexorably to terror and
totalitarianism. She may not have been altogether wrong. All those
do-gooders are more dangerous than they look. Even the much-touted idea of a
tax on currency speculation (designed to reduce market volatility and
provide resources for sustainable development) would require worldwide
ideological consensus for its enactment. Chasing foreign exchange trading
from one tax haven to another, and from currency deals to bonds to
commodities to derivatives needs bigger government than anything that
currently exists. Effective environmental regulation would restrict the
movement, fertility and consumption patterns of individuals all over the
planet. The ideological alternative to Neoliberalism is, as Neoliberals
never tire of saying, some form of totalitarianism.

But that can only be a reason for people to start thinking about what new
forms of totalitarianism might be possible, and, indeed,desirable. In the
United States, the discussion has been kick-started by the recent
hijackings. Globalisation appears to have created a world of unlimited risk,
without a corresponding totalisation of the means of social control. Some
commentators, following Samuel Huntington's 'clash of civilisations' model,
argue that global social control is impossible and the only way to contain
risk is to maintain the boundaries between civilisations. For Neoliberals,
however, commitment to globalisation necessitates the search for some form
of global authority - the shifting nexus of institutions and alliances that
Hardt and Negri call Empire. But this is never going to yield the type of
intensive social regulation needed to limit all the risks of a global
society. Unlimited risks need total controls and, as Hardt and Negri point
out, 'totalitarianism consists not simply in totalising the effects of
social life and subordinating them to a global disciplinary norm' but also
in 'the organic foundation and unified source of society and the state'.

Hardt and Negri have no interest in the control of risk - a world of
unlimited risk is a world of unlimited constituent power - and they dismiss
the totalitarian understanding of society as one in which 'community is not
a dynamic collective creation but a primordial founding myth.' But the
debate about social control prompted by the hijackings is one that others on
the Left should hurry to join. The issue here is not American hypocrisy
(Nagasaki, not Pearl Harbor, is the relevant comparison): let the Swiss cast
the first stone - London has statues of war criminals all over the place. It
is rather that, without yet realising it, the world's only superpower wants
to achieve something that presupposes greater economic and social
justice.Current US policy may be unacceptable, but the long-term project
holds an unexpected promise.

If the 'war against terrorism' is going to be less of a fiasco than the 'war
on drugs', it requires global social inclusivity and reciprocity. Total
social control involves a degree of microregulation with which individuals
have to co-operate. One way totalitarian societies have differed from those
that are merely authoritarian is in their provision of work and healthcare.
(If you want to keep track of people you cannot abandon them when they are
unemployed or sick.) The link between welfare and totalitarianism works both
ways: social regulation and inclusion go together. If the US wants to make
the world a safer place, it will eventually have to offer, or force other
governments to provide, the population of the entire world with the means to
participate in global society. This will involve real constraints on the
operation of the market, particularly finance capital. Tuesday, 11 September
2001 may prove to be the date at which Neoliberalism and globalisation
parted company.

'Nous sommes tous Américains,' proclaimed the editorial in Le Monde. And not
just those who were horrified by the hijackings: the attack on New York and
Washington was not an act of war against a foreign enemy (it had no
strategic value) but a protest that implicitly acknowledged the sovereignty
of the United States. 'I am an American Airlines pilot,' boasted one
hijacker, drinking in his local bar. A mixture of black humour and wishful
thinking no doubt, but a clear indication of psychological proximity. If
Americans fail to understand why their country is hated, it is often because
they barely comprehend the extent of its influence. No one travels halfway
round the world to kill themselves amid a people with whom they feel no
connection. Even in the Arabian desert, America is uncomfortably close. For
the US, it may seem like a foreign war, but on the other side it is more
like a civil war, dividing families - the bin Ladens, for instance.

One thing that the hijackings have brought to the surface is the extent to
which 'the primordial founding myth' of a total society is already available
in the history of the United States. At one level, Hardt and Negri recognise
this. Their work is free of the European Left's residual anti-Americanism
and represents a systematic effort to appropriate the American myth for the
global multitude. But theirs is the America of potentia not of potestas.
They miss the point that even if the multitude could create its own
Americas, it would be stronger under the sovereignty of the existing one -
not just materially better off, but better able to bring about its social
and political objectives.

The international Left's few successes of the past fifty years -
decolonisation, anti-racism, the women's movement, cultural
anti-authoritarianism - have all had proper (and often official) backing
from within the United States. The United States is no utopia, but a utopian
politics now has to be routed through it. Anti-globalisation is often an
argument for the globalisation of American norms - why should workers in the
Philippines have fewer rights than their American counterparts? Israel will
join the list of 'rogue states' only when the United States becomes more
representative of the population of the world. The totalitarian regimes of
the 20th century got a bad name less because of their monopolistic control
of everyday life than on account of their stifling insistence on a maxim of
shared values, and their draconian punishments for nonconformity. They were,
in Durkheimian terms, attempts to create total communities rather than total
societies. 

The US offers a model for a different type of totalitarianism. Within a
total society - a world of universal anomie populated by the hybridised
subjects of mutual recognition - monopolistic microregulation need not be
concerned with conformity. Of course, a global United States is not a total
society, but total society is rapidly becoming more imaginable than the
state of nature from which political theorising has traditionally started.
In this situation, we need to start thinking in new ways. Negri's version of
what Althusser called 'totality without closure' is a politics without a
social contract, 'a constituent power without limitations'. But in a total
society, it is not the social that needs a contract but the individual - an
anti-social contract that creates individual spaces in a world totally
regulated by meaningless mutuality.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

I thought I'd post this, too. It's unbelievably stupid, published in one of
the flagship magazines of US conservatism (The New Republic). Don't read it,
it'll  make you angry - and afraid. Scary shit. Worth noting, however: the
subsumption of _Empire_ into a more general anti-arabism/anti-islamism. SZ

The Snake 
by Alan Wolfe 

Issue Date: 10.01.01
Post Date: 09.27.01

Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
(Harvard University Press, 504 pp., $18.95 paper)

"As ... the twentieth century draws to a close," write Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, "capitalism is miraculously healthy, its accumulation more
robust than ever." For these writers, though not for most consumers and
citizens, capitalism's capacity to survive, and even to flourish, poses a
grave problem. "How can we reconcile this fact," they ask, "with the careful
analyses of numerous Marxist authors at the beginning of the century who
pointed to the imperialist conflicts as symptoms of an impending ecological
disaster running up against the limits of nature?" Everything that is flawed
about this deeply flawed book is contained in the way the authors ask, and
then try to answer, this question.

The most obvious of these flaws is the premise that there is anything to
reconcile in the first place. Analysts committed to falsifiable ways of
developing theories about the world, when faced with a gap between what was
expected to happen and what actually happened, would likely reason along
these lines: Marx predicted frequent crises in the capitalist mode of
production that would eventually lead to socialism, but in reality
capitalism succeeded and socialism failed, and so something must be wrong
with Marxism. But the argumentation in this book cares as little for logic
as it does for empirical reality.

For Hardt and Negri, Marxism is simply a given. This does not mean that it
is sacrosanct: on the contrary, much of this book is devoted to moving
beyond just about everything that Marx had to say about modern capitalism.
Yet all these exertions are made in the name of Marxism, including the
choice of language and metaphor, the reliance on ponderous theory, and the
weakness for the issuance of manifestos. Whereas Marx separated these tasks,
producing an all-time best-seller as well as long volumes of historical and
economic analysis, Hardt and Negri throw it all together in one meandering,
wordy, and incoherent book--a book that, as the authors themselves suggest,
need not be read from start to finish but can be hopscotched through if the
reader prefers. (I chose to read it the old-fashioned way.)

Even if one does believe that Marx is worth consulting about the trajectory
of capitalism, the notion that Marxism was concerned with an impending
ecological catastrophe is the second mortal flaw in the question that Hardt
and Negri pose. Marx himself was a celebrant of industry over agriculture, a
determined modernist quite happy to see "the idiocy of rural life" destroyed
once and for all. And the twentieth-century writers who extended Marxist
theory to the relationship between capitalist societies and their
colonies--Lenin and Luxemburg are the two most prominent intellectuals in
this regard, and the two most discussed by Hardt and Negri--were similarly
oblivious to any limits that nature might impose on man's capacity to
expand. Lenin, having shed so few tears over the killing of one of nature's
more interesting creatures (I mean us), was hardly likely to weep at the
demise of the snail darter. It is equally difficult to imagine
Luxemburg--urban, cosmopolitan, Jewish--as a lover of the Polish landscape.
Ecology, far from being a term identified with the left, was actually coined
by Ernst Haeckel, a German writer with distinctly fascist sympathies. Thus
one has to read Hardt and Negri's question many times over, so flat-out
wrong are its assertions and its assumptions, in order to judge whether they
can possibly be serious.

  


s irrelevant as ecology was to Marxism, it is very relevant to today's
political activists--or militants, as these writers prefer to call them.
Unlike Marx, who developed a theory and then looked for a class that might
embody its realization, Hardt and Negri begin with angry and disaffected
people and then try to raise a theory that might explain, or explain away,
their frustration. Some (but not all) of those concerned with the condition
of the environment are indeed furious, and sometimes their fury takes
radical, even violent, forms. And so Hardt and Negri make a dangerously
opportunistic move: they simply reinterpret the tradition out of which they
write to accommodate the new radicalism, as if Marxism can be moved this way
or that way depending upon who happens to be protesting what on any
particular day. 

Hardt and Negri provide a brief catalogue of the protests that they find
most thrilling. Some of the events on their list--Tiananmen Square, the
intifada, Chiapas--are either fresh in memory or still taking place, while
others--the Los Angeles race riots in 1992 and the strikes in France in 1995
and in South Korea in 1996--are already a little hazy. The authors quickly
acknowledge that those protests were brief, inspired few imitations, and
were not focused on a common enemy. Still, "we ought to be able to recognize
that although all of these struggles focused on their own local and
immediate circumstances, they all nonetheless posed problems of
supranational relevance, problems that are proper to the new figure of
imperial capitalist regulation."

The same recognition, presumably, would apply to such protest movements as
the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization, the Genoa
protests against the G-8 meeting, and the protests against the International
Monetary Fund and World Bank that were supposed to take place in Washington
this week. (Hardt and Negri wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in support
of the Genoa protests in July.) For whether the participants in any of these
events realize it or not, Hardt and Negri instruct, they are all engaged in
the same activity, which is "a refusal of the post-Fordist regime of social
control." 

  


ordism! The term was coined by the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci
to characterize a society in which the assembly line no longer organizes
just the factory but spreads to society as a whole. It is a radical term of
art for industrial settings. But Mexican peasants, Chinese students, and
Palestinian nationalists neither live nor work in highly organized
industrial societies, a fact that deserves to be regarded as a problem for
anyone who would interpret the Mexican, Chinese, and Palestinian movements
as evidence of a rebellion against capitalism. But Hardt and Negri hasten to
reassure us that there is no problem at all, because capitalism itself is no
longer Fordist, and this opens up new possibilities for opposition.

Under Fordist modes of production, they explain, protest spreads
horizontally: workers in one country would go on strike, hopefully
stimulating workers in other countries to do likewise, and the eventual
result (assuming the theory works, which of course it does not) would be a
general strike across all nation-states that would paralyze capitalism and
render it powerless. In post-Fordist conditions, by contrast, protests "are
forced to leap vertically and touch immediately on the global level." Marx
developed the metaphor of the mole to portray the ways in which movements of
workers would bore through tunnels hidden from sight, only to emerge from
time to time to make themselves seen and heard. The appropriate metaphor for
the conditions in which protest movements now find themselves, in Hardt and
Negri's view, is the snake. Slithering around at the edges of the new global
order, these movements "are immediately subversive in themselves and do not
wait on any sort of external aid or extension to guarantee their
effectiveness." They are capable instead of coiling themselves up to "strike
directly at the highest articulations of the imperial order."

The authors of Empire see no reason to exclude explicit reactionaries,
including religious fundamentalists, from the catalogue of post-Fordist
movements that they admire. Fundamentalists, they write, are often portrayed
as anti-modernist, but this is Western propaganda. "It is more accurate and
more useful ... to understand the various fundamentalism [sic] not as the
re-creation of a pre-modern world, but rather as a powerful refusal of the
contemporary historical passage in course." Neglecting to mention the
Taliban's treatment of women, Hardt and Negri go out of their way to
reassure readers of the genuinely subversive nature of the Islamic version
of fundamentalism. These movements are motivated not by nostalgic attempts
to reconstruct the past, but by "original thought." They are anti-Western,
which means that they are anti-capitalist. Properly understood, they are
postmodern rather than premodern, since they engage in a refusal of Western
hegemony, with the proviso that fundamentalism speaks to the losers in the
globalization project and postmodernism to the winners. Hardt and Negri even
leave the impression that, if they had to choose between the postmodernists
in Western universities and the fundamentalists in Iran, they would prefer
the latter: "The losers in the process of globalization might indeed be the
ones who give us the strongest indication of the transformation in process."

  


e cannot know, of course, whether Hardt and Negri, in the light of the
recent atrocities at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, will want to
change their minds about the progressive potential of Islamic
fundamentalism. But their book gives no grounds on which such attacks can be
condemned. For if being against the West is the sine qua non of good and
effective protest, well, no one could accuse the murderers in New York and
Washington of not being against Western hegemony. And if it is true, as
Hardt and Negri blithely claim, that efforts to find legitimate reasons for
intervening in world affairs are only a smokescreen for the exercise of
hegemonic power, then the way is cleared for each and every illegitimate act
of global intervention, since in the postmodern world of this book no
justifiable distinctions between good and evil acts can ever be made.

Never saying so explicitly, the authors of this book, in identifying their
hopes with such disparate movements of protest whatever their targets or
their political coloration, are throwing over the most central proposition
of Marxism: class consciousness. Workers no longer need to be aware of
themselves as workers in order to bring down capitalism. They need not
develop a revolutionary strategy, for under contemporary conditions "it may
no longer be useful to insist on the old distinction between strategy and
tactics." They do not even need to be workers. All that is required is that
they set themselves up against power, whatever and wherever power happens to
be. 

Never mind that movements that do so can stand for wildly different
objectives--an open society here, a closed society there; or that they are
also, as Hardt and Negri point out, often unable or unwilling to communicate
with each other. Indeed, as Hardt and Negri do not point out, they might, if
they had the chance, prefer to kill one another. But this lack of
communication and mutual appreciation "is in fact a strength rather than a
weakness." Traditional Marxism aimed to find the weakest link in the
capitalist system and to exploit it. But there are no more weak links.
Capital has become so pervasive that it exposes itself nowhere, but this
means that it is really exposed everywhere. Protest movements simply cannot
be peripheral: since there is no center, there is no periphery. Everything
that dissents--even "piercings, tattoos, punk fashion and its various
imitations"--foreshadows the stirrings that are necessary to challenge the
new forms that capitalism is taking.

II.

Most of Empire is an exercise in nominalism, in the attempt to name, rather
than to describe, to analyze, or even to condemn, the new order that its
authors see emerging. Although it is presumably devoted to outlining the
contours of a new mode of production, the book contains no data, offers no
effort to demonstrate who owns what or holds power over whom, and provides
no indicators of any of the deplorable conditions that it discusses. As if
once again to distinguish itself from Marx, Empire, like the left Hegelians
whom Marx once attacked, moves entirely at the level of ideas. Unlike the
left Hegelians, however, Hardt and Negri handle ideas incompetently.

This would-be revolutionary book starts, of all places, with the ideas of
Hans Kelsen, before jumping over to John Rawls and Niklas Luhmann. Each new
chapter seems to suggest that Hardt and Negri, having cleared their throats,
are about to turn to the world around them--but then, out of nowhere, there
arrives a discussion of Augustine, Machiavelli, or Polybius. It is
impossible to know which of the two authors was primarily responsible for
which portions of the book, but the reader comes away with the impression
that one of them--Negri--has spent so much time in prison reading and taking
notes that he is determined to cram into the book everything that he has
uncovered, pertinent or not.

The point of this exercise in intellectual name-dropping is to argue that
imperialism has been replaced by something called "Empire." Although global
in its ambitions, imperialism was dependent on the nation-state, for each
imperial power attempted to organize the globe on behalf of the national
corporations that it represented. In that sense, imperialism was associated
with Fordism. Organized horizontally, moreover, imperialism divided the
world into blocs, each controlled by a central power that looked with
suspicion on--and from time to time engaged in war with--rival imperial
powers. That form of capitalist organization, however much it may have
concentrated the mind of Lenin, is on its way out, and Hardt and Negri bid
it good riddance. Just as Marx celebrated capitalism's victory over
feudalism, they exhort radicals today to take heart in the fact that
imperialism is being replaced by Empire.

Empire itself emerges with postmodernity. (In its initial formulation,
"postmodern" was an adjective modifying a noun such as a condition, a novel,
a building, or a city; but as Hardt and Negri use the term, it is
transformed into an actual thing that presumably began at a particular point
in time and exists in a particular place, though neither the time nor the
place is ever specified by them.) Unlike imperialism, Empire has no center
and is not controlled by anyone. As the authors characteristically put it:
"Empire exhausts historical time, suspends history, and summons the past and
future within its own ethical order." Empire is--this is where Luhmann comes
in--autopoietic, that is, it runs by itself. "The imperial machine lives by
producing a context of equilibria and/or reducing complexities, pretending
to put forward a project of universal citizenship and toward this end
intensifying the effectiveness of its intervention over every element of the
communicative relationship, all the while dissolving identity and history in
a completely postmodern fashion."

Under conditions of Empire, everything is in flux and up for grabs. It no
longer follows, as it did under imperialism, that economic factors determine
all other aspects of life. Capitalism, especially in its Fordist forms,
aimed to impose order on otherwise anarchic processes, but it was content to
transform the surplus labor of workers into capital, and so it managed to
stop short of exercising full control over the individual's mind and body.
Post-Fordism went further: by extending the factory to social life as a
whole, it also extended power's reach into schools, prisons, and asylums.
People living under Empire require even more control than those forms found
in early versions of post-Fordism, for the essentially post-Fordist
disciplinary institutions analyzed by Michel Foucault "did not succeed in
consuming them completely in the rhythm of productive practices and
productive socialization; it did not reach the point of permeating entirely
the consciousness and bodies of individuals, the point of treating and
organizing them in the totality of their activities." In the stage in which
we find ourselves now--let us call it post-post-Fordism--society is " ...
subsumed within a power that reaches down to the ganglia of the social
structure and its processes of development [and] reacts like a single body.
Power is thus expressed as a control that extends throughout the depths of
the consciousness and bodies of the population--and at the same time across
the entirety of social relations."

Hardt and Negri call this process of total control "biopower," which they
define as "a form of power that regulates social life from its interior,
following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it." By
transforming Marx's economic determinism into a form of biological
determinism, Hardt and Negri manage to remove every last shred of humanism
in Marxism. For all his insistence that his criticism of capitalism was
motivated by considerations of science rather than by considerations of
morality, Marx never fully abandoned the anthropocentric character of the
romantic movements out of which he emerged. He was, for one thing, persuaded
that human beings possessed an irreducible nature; inspired by Prometheus,
Marx took it for granted that they came equipped with a drive to create. It
was precisely this productive capacity--this determination on the part of
human beings to create value--that drove capitalists to try to expropriate
from workers their human essence, their "species being."

But Hardt and Negri will have none of this talk of human nature, or use
value, or labor power. Capital will exploit wherever and whatever it can.
With bio-power in command, our bodies are no longer irreducibly ours. Our
bodies have instead turned against themselves; they are the very instruments
by which we are controlled by forces external to us. We therefore have to
"recognize our posthuman bodies and minds" and see ourselves "for the
simians and cyborgs we are" before we can begin to unleash whatever creative
powers we may have left over.

But all is not lost for us simians and cyborgs. Unlike the writers of the
Frankfurt School, who also emphasized the authoritarian character of
contemporary capitalism, writers such as Gilles Deleuze and FÈlix Guattari,
who are the true intellectual heroes of Empire, recognize that efforts at
total control create contradictions of their own. Here, in prose that
insults language, is how Hardt and Negri summarize what they have
understood: "The analysis of real subsumption, when this is understood as
investing not only the economic or only the cultural dimension of society
but rather the social bios itself, and when it is attentive to the
modalities of disciplinarity and/or control, disrupts the linear and
totalitarian figure of capitalist development." What this means is that
under Empire there emerges a "paradox of power" in which all elements of
social life are unified, but the very act of unification "reveals a new
context, a new milieu of maximum plurality and uncontainable
singularization--a milieu of the event." Even when Empire seems to rule
everywhere and over everything, there are opportunities for resistance, if
only those opportunities can be grasped and seen.

Although Empire is not controlled by anyone, it does require coordination,
and therefore it also requires communication. Communication is to Hardt and
Negri what production was to Marx: the central activity of society without
which nothing else is possible. And, like production, communication requires
workers, or immaterial labor, as the authors call those people who do not
produce goods but instead deliver services. It thus follows that "the
central role previously occupied by the labor power of mass factory workers
in the production of surplus value is today increasingly filled by
intellectual, immaterial, and communicative labor power." So professors have
a purpose after all: they can "develop a new political theory of value that
can pose the problem of this new capitalist accumulation of value at the
center of the mechanism of exploitation (and thus, perhaps, at the center of
potential revolt)." All those demonstrators out there who fail to
communicate with each other require someone to communicate for them, and who
better to do the communication than those who make the production of words
central to their existence?

III.

Empire is best understood as an attempt, using Marxist jargon, to bring back
to life the political urge that Marx spent much of his energy opposing:
anarchism, and particularly the more destructive form of anarchism
associated with writers such as Bakunin. "You are just a bunch of
anarchists, the new Plato on the block will yell at us," Hardt and Negri
declare, before responding that they cannot be anarchists because they speak
"from the standpoint of a materiality constituted in the networks of
productive cooperation, in other words, from the perspective of a humanity
that is constructed productively, that is constituted through the ëcommon
name' of freedom." I have no Platonic aspirations, but it does strike me
that if the authors were providing an accurate account of their own book,
they would be quite correct that there is nothing anarchist about it. But
their account of their enterprise is wrong on every count. Empire rejects
materiality in favor of immaterial labor, production in favor of
communication, humanity in favor of cyborgs, freedom in favor of hybridity.

The anarchist flavor of Empire is conveyed most strikingly by its
romanticization of violence. Although by now everyone knows that there are
terrorists in this world, there are no terrorists in Hardt and Negri's book.
There are only people who are called terrorists, "a crude conception and
terminological reduction that is rooted in a police mentality." Terms such
as "ethnic terrorists" and "drug mafias" appear within quotation marks, as
if no serious revolutionary could believe that there were such things.
"Totalitarianism" is another pure construct, simply an invention of cold war
ideology, that has been used to "denounce the destruction of the democratic
sphere...." Certainly the term has little to do with actual life in the
Soviet Union, which Hardt and Negri describe as "a society criss-crossed by
extremely strong instances of creativity and freedom."

Negri, when not in prison, has been a political philosopher, and he is the
author of numerous books, manifestos, and theses on subjects ranging from
Spinoza's metaphysics to the nature of insurgency under contemporary
capitalism. In nearly all this work, as in Empire, he invariably associates
violence with states in the exercise of their power, never with opposition
groups and their tactics. For the latter, any action, no matter how
insurrectionary, is justified. For the former, any action, no matter how
peaceful, is terrorism in disguise.

  


rom this warped perspective, all states are equally bad and all movements of
opposition are equally good. Only the working of such a myopia can help the
reader to understand why the authors of Empire are incapable of mustering
any rigorous historical or moral consciousness of Nazism and its policy of
Jewish extermination. In their view Nazism is capitalism, and that is the
end of the story. Nazi Germany, Hardt and Negri write, far from a unique
excursion into human evil, "is the ideal type of the transformation of
modern sovereignty into national sovereignty and of its articulation into
capitalist form...."

Since Nazism is merely normal capitalism--this point of view was once
associated with the Frankfurt School, and it survives almost nowhere outside
the pages of this book--there is no reason to single out the Nazis or their
sympathizers for crimes against humanity. Astonishingly, Hardt and Negri are
worse than neutral in their discussion of the Nazi period: they actually
heap praise on the ordinary Germans who supported the regime. The obedience
of these citizens is called "exemplary" in this book. The authors also
celebrate "their military and civil valor in the service of the nation,"
before moving on to identify the victims whom they valorously helped to send
to Buchenwald as "communists, homosexuals, Gypsies, and others," the latter,
presumably, being the Jews (whom Hardt and Negri reserve for Auschwitz).

I am not making this up. Lest anyone consider these apologetics for Nazism a
misreading of my own--how can good leftists, after all, engage in a
downplaying of the Holocaust?--Hardt and Negri twice acknowledge that they
are completely fed up with the whole question of totalitarianism. It is
certainly much less interesting to them than the depredations of Empire. The
phenomenon of totalitarianism, they write, has already been described "with
great fanfare" by "many (in fact too many) authors"; and then they announce,
in the one sustained passage in their book devoted to Hitler and his regime,
that, despite their efforts to write a book aiming to discuss everything,
they plan to "leave this story to other scholars and to the disgrace of
history." 


t is one thing to put quotation marks around a word such as "terrorist" and
to be so morally obtuse to the most violent regimes of the twentieth
century. It is another thing entirely for Antonio Negri to do so. For the
question of whether Negri was himself a violence-prone terrorist is still
open. In April 1979, Negri, who was then a professor at the University of
Padua, was arrested and charged with armed insurrection. He was not
convicted on the most serious charges, which amounted to the accusation
that, as the leader of the Red Brigades, he was responsible for the
assassination of Christian Democratic politician Aldo Moro; but he was found
guilty of lesser charges and sentenced to preventive detention. (Among other
things, the judge in the case quoted from a letter written by Negri in which
he said that "without weapons, the mass struggle doesn't exist.")

Determined not to go to jail, Negri won a seat in parliament, which gave him
immunity; but the Italian Chamber of Deputies stripped him of it, and he
fled to France in 1983. In 1997, he voluntarily returned to Italy and was
incarcerated. He took this action, he said, in order to clarify the
situation of other New Leftists who were in exile. He is still a prisoner, a
feature of his biography that is prominently displayed by Harvard University
Press on the back of Empire. So as not to detract from the dramatic flair of
their author, the publishers neglect to mention that Negri is released
during the day to live in his apartment in Rome with his girlfriend,
spending only his nights in jail.

As is the case with so much of the violence associated with the New Left, it
is difficult to know exactly what Negri did. We do know that Italy, like
Germany, experienced considerable political violence in the 1960s and 1970s,
and that many radical groups, distrustful of the cautious conservatism of
the Community Party, created ultra-leftist sects such as Autonomia Operaia
that either engaged directly in criminal acts or sought to justify them as a
necessary stage in the destruction of capitalism. Negri, who was closely
associated with these splinter groups as a member and a theorist, has had
many opportunities since then to revisit his past and to reflect on whether
the violence of the times was wrong. He has chosen not to do so. Instead he
has argued that violence is built into all the institutions and all the
practices of capitalism, as if to conclude that because society itself is so
violent, one can hardly be surprised that its opponents tend in that
direction as well. Empire is merely the latest of a series of books in which
a completely unrepentant Negri defends himself. No wonder that efforts to
win his full release from prison--efforts that will surely escalate now that
Negri has received the imprimatur of America's most prestigious academic
press--have failed.

  


ith the memory of five thousand dead bodies destroyed beyond recognition by
deadly terrorist attacks still so fresh, readers in America these days do
not need to be reminded of the ugliness that violence brings in its wake.
Yet Hardt and Negri evidently need such a reminder. Their book, as it comes
to a close, contains an apologia for violence past and present that, in the
light of recent events, ought to send a chill down every reader's spine.
Those singled out for special praise in Empire include the Industrial
Workers of the World, or Wobblies, an oft-romanticized anarcho-syndicalist
group that Hardt and Negri manage to describe as "radical republican." IWW
militants, they write, offer a prototype of resistance to Empire. "The
Wobbly [sic] constructed associations among working people from below,
through continuous agitation, and while organizing them gave rise to utopian
thought and revolutionary knowledge." A similar movement today would take
the form of what Hardt and Negri call a "post-modern posse." They are
attracted to this term because posse is Latin for "having power," but it
does not escape their notice that the term is also identified with the posse
comitatus of Hollywood Westerns. (They neglect to mention that this is also
the name of choice of some of America's most violently inclined right-wing
sects.) 

The Marxist historian E.J. Hobsbawm once wrote a book called Primitive
Rebels, about seemingly medieval gangs of Robin Hood-like bandits, such as
the Neapolitan Camorra or the Tuscan Lazzarettists, that persisted into the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Italy and Spain. Sometimes
anarchistic, sometimes fascistic, these millenarian movements appealed not
to the urban workers of capitalism, but to the displaced Lumpenproletariat.
When Hardt and Negri celebrate rap groups or window-smashing anarchists, it
is these bandits, who have always been viewed with great suspicion by
Marxists, that they see.

To such movements of resistance, Hardt and Negri offer praise but no advice.
Never has a revolutionary manifesto been so devoid of actual content as the
one contained in this book. The real militant against Empire, Hardt and
Negri insist, is not one "who acts on the basis of duty and discipline, who
pretends that his or her actions are deducted [sic] from an ideal plan."
(The Jesuits are, somewhat bizarrely, offered as an example of such
discipline, but any Marxist would read this as a rejection of a Leninist
revolutionary vanguard.) No, to be a militant you must turn the bio-power
directed against you inside out, by exploring "the productive cooperation of
mass intellectuality and affective networks, the productivity of postmodern
biopolitics." Hobsbawm wrote of the chiliastic bandits of the nineteenth
century that, whatever their other differences, they shared "a fundamental
vagueness about the actual way in which the new society will be brought
about," and no better description of anarchism in its postmodern form has
yet been written.

  


he anarchism advocated in Empire does have one rather idiosyncratic feature:
it is informed by Christianity. Hardt and Negri find in Christendom a
precursor for Empire--not that odd a comparison if we live in a world in
which chronological time no longer means anything, but an odd comparison
certainly if particular historical periods are built on the events that
preceded them. Once Christendom is introduced as a topic, it becomes
immediately clear that the great theorist of Empire is not Marx, it is
Augustine. Empire is a postmodern twist on The City of God. "In Empire,"
Hardt and Negri write, echoing Augustine's denunciation of Rome, "corruption
is everywhere," reflected in "the supreme government of Empire and its
vassal administrations, the most refined and the most rotten administrative
police forces, the lobbies of the ruling classes, the mafias of rising
social groups, the churches and sects, the perpetuators and persecutors of
scandal, the great financial conglomerates, and everyday economic
transactions." Although Hardt and Negri would never use such language, they
are clearly persuaded that life under Empire is suffused with sin.

And redemption will come from the multitude, who despite their oppression
under empire--or Empire--remain pure in heart. In them, one can see the
emergence of the new city that will put us at one with the world. Unlike
Augustine's, of course, their city cannot be the divine one, since "the
multitude today ... resides on the imperial surfaces where there is no God
the Father and no transcendence." Instead, they will create "the earthly
city of the multitude," which the authors esoterically define as "the
absolute constitution of labor and cooperation." About the practical
question of how this can be done, Hardt and Negri have nothing significant
to say. "The only response that we can give to these questions is that the
action of the multitude becomes political primarily when it begins to
confront directly and with an adequate consciousness the central repressive
operations of Empire." This, too, is a Christian conception of revolution.
We cannot know how we will be saved; we must recognize that if only we have
faith, a way will be found.

Empire ends not with a paean to Marx or Lenin, but with a prayer for Francis
of Assisi: "To denounce the poverty of the multitude he adopted that common
condition and discovered there the ontological power of a new society. The
communist militant does the same, identifying in the common condition of the
multitude its enormous wealth. Francis ... posed a joyous life, including
all of being and nature, the animals, sister moon, brother son, the birds of
the field, the poor and exploited humans, together against the will and
power of corruption." Pierce your ears, paint your face, run angry through
the streets, and you too can be a saint. It is not clear whether you will
ever actually stop companies from merging or bankers from providing loans,
but the glimpse that you will be vouchsafed of the heavenly city that is
available to us on Earth, so long as you are sufficiently militant, is
reward enough. If you do all this, you will find yourself in "a revolution
that no power will control--because bio-power and communism, cooperation and
revolution remain together, in love, simplicity, and also innocence. This is
the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist."

IV.

There is no idea in Empire that has not been expressed before. In a rare
moment of lucidity, Michael Hardt correctly told Emily Eakin of The New York
Times that "Toni and I don't think of this as a very original book. We're
putting together a variety of things that others have said." Still, Empire
has become something of a publishing sensation. The Times has pronounced
that it has "buzz," the most enviable epithet of all. It has sold out in
bookstores around the country; it is being translated into at least ten
languages; and it has been featured in gushing media accounts, including
Eakin's uninformed account in the Times. (For the Times' reporter on "Arts
and Ideas," testimony from tired Marxists such as Stanley Aronowitz or
Fredric Jameson is taken as proof that Empire may be the next big thing
among other equally washed-out Marxists.)

Still, there is no denying the book's relevance. The fate of Empire and the
fate of globalized protests against globalization have become intertwined,
as if the one has become dependent on the other. Every revolution needs its
obscure, well-thumbed, and probably unread paperback, and now the anarchists
and the new caravan of protesters have one to call their own. This is a
terrible shame. After two decades in which the left has been reduced to
defending such reactionary policies as classification by race and the
suppression of free speech, the question of global inequality has finally
emerged, and with it emerged an opportunity for the left to regain its
sanity. 

  


ne need not defend socialism, whatever that means these days, in order to
recognize that there is something profoundly wrong about the staggeringly
huge gaps in wealth that exist between the world's richest regions and its
poorest regions. Any movement that directed itself against the arrogant and
aloof policies of the world's richest countries, and that did so by
appealing to commonly agreed-upon conceptions of justice, would be in a
position to achieve some real good in the world. From the appalling costs of
anti-AIDS medicines in Africa to the efforts by the International Monetary
Fund to impose stringent requirements on countries that are barely able to
feed their own people, there are more than enough good and burning issues
that could not only enable the left to gain the moral high-ground, but could
also win the hearts of moderate and even conservative people who have little
at stake in defending the policies of increasingly rapacious global
corporations.

But such a sensible and decent left will not emerge if Empire--a lazy
person's guide to revolution--has its way. The authors of this book, having
taken no steps to learn anything about what globalization actually is and
what its continuation would actually mean, cannot inspire their readers to
do likewise. Rather than developing a tutorial attitude toward protest,
bringing to younger militants the knowledge of history and the wisdom of
experience, they glorify know-nothingism and turn obsequious before
fascists. Instead of reminding protesters that politics is a demanding
business, they romanticize the self-indulgence of punks and freaks. Faced
with the difficulties of constructing a theoretical account of how an
ever-changing capitalism has changed once again, they paper over their
contradictions with jargon and borrow promiscuously from every academic
fashion. There is indeed corruption in the contemporary world--and none more
noteworthy in this context than the intellectual corruption that can enable
a book as shabby as this one to be taken seriously by anyone.

  


mpire is to social and political criticism what pornography is to
literature. It flirts with revolution as if one society can be replaced by
another as easily as one body can be substituted for another. It gives
academic readers the thrill of engaging with the ideas of the New Left's
most insurrectionary days, all the while pretending that the author of these
ideas is an "independent researcher and writer," as Harvard's book jacket
calls Negri, while secretly hoping--imagine the glamour in radical academic
circles that this would give him!--that he really was guilty of the acts for
which he was imprisoned. For angry militants who have never read Bakunin but
who understand in their gut that every destructive urge is a creative one,
Empire offers the support of professors who are supposed to know what they
are talking about; and if one is too busy running through the streets to
grasp the full implications of what Homi K. Bhabha says about binary
divisions, or to reflect on Althusser's reading of The Prince, one can at
least come away rinsed in the appropriate critique. Empire is a thoroughly
non-serious book on a most serious topic, an outrageously irresponsible tour
through questions of power and violence--questions that, as we cannot help
but remember as we mourn our dead in Manhattan and Washington, demand the
greatest responsibility on the part of both writers and readers.

The New Left got a lot of things wrong, but it got one thing right:
institutions that wield tremendous authority over the lives of ordinary
people cannot be trusted with unlimited power, for, in the absence of checks
and constraints on their activities, they will do whatever they can to
maximize their advantage. As the New Left turned violent and sought support
from the fringes, it lost that significant insight, eventually decomposing
into sectarian paranoia or academic obscurantism. The most remarkable
accomplishment of Empire is to combine both of those degenerations into a
frightfully unstable mixture. There is bad news in this, and worse news. The
bad news is that anti-globalization protesters, should they find anything of
value in this book, will lead their very promising movement into the same
dead ends as the New Left. The worse news is that, to reverse Marx's famous
dictum, this will happen the second time as tragedy rather than as farce.