More on Taking Apart Hardt

["M. Junaid Alam" <redjaguar@xxxxxxxxx>]

Comrade MacLennan says:

"They [Hardt] seek to prevent us from identifying the enemy or getting
to grips with the centres of power, by denying there is any actual
identifiable enemy occupying a particular centre, which we could storm."

Sometimes, in revolutionary times it is useful to visit the words of
certain revolutionaries. To wit, Ernesto Guevara in his Message to the
Tricontinental:

"We must bear in mind that imperialism is a world system, the last stage
of capitalism--and it must be defeated in a world confrontation. The
strategic end of this struggle should be the destruction of
imperialism...

While envisaging the destruction of imperialism, it is necessary to
identify its head, which is no other than the United States of
America...

Let us sum up our hopes for victory: total destruction of imperialism by
eliminating its firmest bulwark, the oppression exercised by the United
States of America...

Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism, and a battle hymn
for the people's unity against the great enemy of mankind: the United
States of America."

Look at the lucidity, the clarity, the boldness of the
proposition--here, there is no question of introducing erudite rubbish
into the equation. The struggle, its aims, its enemy--all is targeted
and identified. But for Hardt this would undoubtedly just be
"anti-American"--this is the level at which he speaks.

The main engine, the main phenomenon behind the war drive is, as we
know, American imperialism. This is what irks Hardt to no end--he wants
to stay on the plane of total abstraction. He wants to invoke the whole
laundry list of WTO/IMF/nation-states/corporations etc etc. In doing so
things come to a head, as this attempt at sophistication via inclusion
of everything is exposed as stupidity via its exclusion of the main
thing.

And as usual, where the hell is Hart's evidence? We know about American
need for energy reserves, we know about concrete economic and political
questions - Kurds, OPEC, the Euro, Zionism, and can thus account for the
behavior of Turkey, America, France, Israel, etc. So where is the meat
on Hart's overarching scheme of "the complex and plural nature of the
forces that dominate capitalist globalization today"? The problem is
that these "forces" are not all moving in tandem as one united unit; in
reality they are in contradiction with one another. There is no grand
ultra-imperialism so Hardt is grasping at straws spitted out of a
camel's ass.

But this is not all. As Mac Lennan further points out, Hardt extends his
mindlessness even further when he writes, "they [anti-globalization
movement] imagined an alternative, democratic globalisation consisting
of plural exchanges across national and regional borders based on
equality and freedom."

So what is the anti-war movement imagining? Was it jumping up and down
in favor of tyranny and singular exchanges based on authoritarianism?
Hardt's flight into abstraction ones again makes nonsense out of
reality. The character and composition of the protests objectively
renders it an international character; of course it aims at the goal of
freedom and equality, because it was on behalf of the Iraqi people, some
of whom are about to lose their lives due to the action of criminal
gangsters.

It must be understood that the two absurdities Hardt presents here are
linked. First, he is pissed because the war drive doesn't correspond
with his theory of Empire. Then, he is pissed because the anti-war drive
doesn't follow the discarded script; its response is not to Empire but
imperialism. So Hardt has to punish this sin by smearing it as somehow
unworthy and provincial.

His dilemma is painfully clear: in his mode of Marxism, the antagonism
of capitalism is not solved through revolution, class war, or open
conflict. It is more like a subsuming, or absorption: nice
ultra-imperialism endows the world with universal, democratic features,
which the inert masses, like sponges, absorb, and then expand so as to
transform existing global capital into a more democratic globalization.
This is repackaged Eurocentric Marxism. The oppressed--wait, what
oppressed, the multitude--are not so much agents of change as
receptacles of capitalist progress, which smoothly transmits the
necessary ingredients for social change.

So when it turns out the world's most powerful capitalist nation is led
by swaggering, arrogant reactionaries, who are hardly any more
interested in bourgeois democracy at home as they are abroad, the
sandcastle of ultra-imperialism crumbles. Capital isn't transmitting a
damn thing to Iraq other than depleted uranium and cruise missiles.
There is no "absorbing" to be done. There is only outright resistance to
this madness, expressed by real people at an intrinsic emotional level,
which can develop into more full political awareness not by any
automatic "global network connections" provided by Hardt's capitalism,
but by organized, dedicated political leadership.

The unfortunate but noteworthy example of al-Qaeda can be made here:
none of their recruits will be beneficiaries of Hardt's non-existent
benevolent Empire, but rather angry and frustrated layers of the
oppressed sucked into fundamentalism because of a Left vacuum.
"Anti-Americanism" may not "make sense" in Hardt's world, but it happens
to make sense for people being bombed and bulldozed by Americans or
American-funded equipment. To just brush off the actually-existing
tactical aspects of organizing opposition to really-existing imperialism
by ignoring the national and colonial questions is to tie our hands
behind our backs politically.

In the following, I may be putting the matter too crudely, but it is
worth the risk. Hardt's logic most neatly manifests itself when it
applies to largely Western, white, middle-class protests on the global
justice front, in which the most drama unfolding involves
cappuccino-sipping individualists hurling their drinks at Starbucks
windows. But it does not work out quite the same in the arena of
imperialist war, which is like rugby compared to touch-football. Much
more is at stake, many more dynamics are shifting and many more
contradictions intensifying, in a situation of total war. In the latter
situation, answers--and more importantly, opportunities--will have to be
found not in neatly arranged Social Forums, but on the streets, in
battles, under police repression and beneath the wings of bombers.



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