Re: Tariq Ali interview in Brazil

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mohammad:
>By the way, does anyone know who in the hell was it that
>described this 400-page literary dissertation as the
>modern equivalent of the Communist Manifesto? That dude
>was on some serious stuff.

That was Zizek on the coverleaf, but he has since stepped back from this
type of hyperbole. In the September 2001 "Rethinking Marxism", which is a
symposium on H-N's "Empire", Zizek has an article titled "Have Hardt and
Negri Written a Communist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?".
Unfortunately, it is only online through Ebsco.com. Here's a salient passage:

This, exactly, is what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are trying to do in
their Empire (2000), a book that sets as its goal, writing the Communist
Manifesto for the twenty-first century. Hardt and Negri describe
globalization as an ambiguous "deterritorialization": victorious global
capitalism pushes into every pore of our social lives, into the most
intimate of spheres, and installs a never present dynamic, which no longer
is based on patriarchal or other hierarchic structures of dominance.
Instead, it causes a flowing, hybrid identity. On the other hand, this
fundamental corrosion of all important social connections lets the genie
out of the bottle: it sets free the potentially centrifugal forces that the
capitalist system is no longer able fully to control. It is exactly because
of its global triumph that the capitalist system is today more vunerable
than ever. The old formula of Marx is still valid: capitalism digs its own
grave. Hardt and Negri describe this process as the transition from the
nation-state to global Empire, a transnational entity comparable to ancient
Rome, in which hybrid masses of scattered identities developed. Hardt and
Negri thus deserve much praise for enlightening us about the contradictory
nature of today's "turbocapitalism" and attempting to identify the
revolutionary potentials of its dynamic. This heroic attempt sets itself
against the standard view of those on the Left who are struggling to limit
the destructive powers of globalization and to rescue (what there is left
to rescue) the welfare state. This standard leftist view is imbued with a
profoundly conservative mistrust of the dynamics of globalization and
digitalization, which is quite contrary to the Marxist confidence in the
powers of progress.

Nevertheless, one immediately gets a sense of the boundaries to Hardt and
Negri's analysis. In their social-economic analysis, the lack of concrete
insight is concealed in the Deleuzean jargon of multitude,
deterritorialization, and so forth. No wonder that the three "practical"
proposals with which this book ends appear anticlimactic. The authors
propose to focus our political struggle on three global rights: the rights
to global citizenship, a minimal income, and the reappropriation of the new
means of production (i.e., access to and control over education,
information, and communication). It is a paradox that Hardt and Negri, the
poets of mobility, variety, hybridization, and so on, call for three
demands formulated in the terminology of universal human rights. The
problem with these demands is that they fluctuate between formal emptiness
and impossible radicalization. Let us take the right to global citizenship:
theoretically, this right, of course, should be approved. However, if this
demand is meant to be taken more seriously than a celebratory formal
declaration in typical United Nations style, then it would mean the
abolition of state borders; under present conditions, such a step would
trigger an invasion of cheap labor from India, China, and Africa into the
United States and Western Europe, which would result in a populist revolt
against immigrants-a revolt of such violent proportions that figures like
Haider would seem models of multicultural tolerance. The same is valid with
regard to the other two demands: for instance, the universal (worldwide)
right to minimal income-of course, why not? But how should one create the
necessary socialeconomic and ideological conditions for such a shattering
transformation?

This critique is not only aimed at the secondary empirical details. The
main problem with Empire is that the book falls short in its fundamental
analysis of how (if at all) the present global, social-economic process
will create the space needed for such radical measures: they fail to
repeat, in today's conditions, Marx's line of argumentation that the
prospect of the proletarian revolution emerges out of the inherent
antagonisms of the capitalist mode of production. In this respect, Empire
remains a pre- Marxist book. However, perhaps the solution is that it is
not enough to return to Marx, to repeat Marx's analysis, but we must needs
return to Lenin.

The first public reaction to such a motto is, of course, an outburst of
sarcastic laughter. Marx: OK, even on Wall Street, they love him today-Marx
the poet of commodities, who provided perfect descriptions of capitalist
dynamics; Marx of the cultural studies, who portrayed the alienation and
reification of our daily lives. But Lenin: no, you can't be serious! The
working-class movement, revolutionary party, and similar zombie concepts?
Doesn't Lenin stand precisely for the failure to put Marxism into practice,
for the catastrophe that left its mark on the entire twentieth-century's
world politics, for the Real Socialist experiment that culminated in an
economically inefficient dictatorship? In contemporary academic politics,
the idea of dealing with Lenin is accompanied by two qualifications: yes,
why not, we live in a liberal democracy, there is freedom of thought . . .
however, one should treat Lenin in an "objective critical and scientific
way," not in an attitude of nostalgic idolatry, and, furthermore, from the
perspective firmly rooted in the democratic political order, within the
horizon of human rights-therein resides the lesson painfully learned
through the experience of twentieth-century totalitarianisms.

What are we to say to this? Again, the problem resides in the implicit
qualifications which can be easily discerned by "concrete analysis of the
concrete situation," as Lenin himself would have put it.


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org



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