Re: Re: Fw: Re: Fw: AUT: Fw: Antonio Negri

[Michael Perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It is not a good idea to bring disagrements from other lists onto this
one.

On Fri, Jun 15, 2001 at 12:40:54PM -0700, Michael Pugliese wrote:
>   Finally found a use for that Ouija board!
> M.P.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Louis Proyect" <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
> To: <aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Friday, June 15, 2001 11:39 AM
> Subject: Re: Fw: [PEN-L:13282] Re: Fw: AUT: Fw: Antonio Negri
>
> Pugliese channeling Doug Henwood:
> > party. Next to typical left pessimism, autonomists can seem dreamily
> > optimistic, seeing struggle and victory where others see apathy and
> > defeat. Where most people (across the political spectrum) see capital
> > as acting and labor as reacting, autonomists see capital as the
> > reactive side of the relation.
>
> Nonsense. "Empire" is characterized by a sense of despair and defeat. That
> is the reason that they reject proletarian revolution and propose that the
> movement organize around a "social wage". Not as bad as Burbach's soup
> kitchens, I guess, but hardly threatening to the status quo.
>
> > Dispersion
> > Empire is an extremely ambitious attempt to theorize the economic and
> > political world today. Though clearly in a Marxist tradition, it's
> > hardly orthodox. Though it pays appropriate homage to Lenin's famous
> > pamphlet on imperialism, there's little that's Leninist about its
> > analysis or especially its politics.
>
> It pays homage to Lenin's pamphlet the same way that Spike Jones paid
> homage to Beethoven.
>
> > or a small network of partners. By the end of the 19th century, the
> > likes of Morgan and Carnegie were assembling small firms into giant
> > combinations like U.S. Steel. By the early 20th century, it was easy
> > to conclude, as Lenin (and Rudolf Hilferding, in his classic Finance
> > Capital) did, that industry was coming under the ownership of a
> > handful of big banks, arranged in cartels often protected by
> > price-fixing and high tariffs. Things didn't turn out that way. Now,
> > giant firms are owned by thousands, even millions, of shareholders,
> > and it's hard to point to a controlling force other than "the
> > markets."
>
> This business about giant firms being "owned" by millions of shareholders
> is obviously a reference to pension funds. If Henwood is seriously arguing
> this point, that postmodernist junk he's been reading over the past 5 years
> has seriously begun to rot out his brain. In reality, you don't need to own
> more than 1 percent of a corporation's outstanding shares to dictate not
> only what it makes but how it makes it.
>
> > Global political power is also dispersed. Unlike 19th century
> > imperialism, when Nation X owned Colony Y, today's hierarchy is
> > harder to specify. There are few cases of outright ownership, and the
> > boundaries between the First and Third Worlds are getting blurrier --
> > literally in the case of the U.S. - Mexico border, but also in the
> > sense of the movements of large numbers of migrants from South to
> > North, and the proliferation of skyscrapers and McDonald's in the
> > South.
>
> Pathetic. The United States flag did not fly over Chile in 1973 but the
> coup was organized from within the American embassy.
>
> > obstacles to the accumulation of capital. By contrast, the age of
> > Empire is one of deregulation and the promotion of trade and capital
> > flows -- all designed to encourage competition, technological
> > innovation, and the integration of the world into a single market.
> > Wars are reserved for "rogue states" that refuse to get with the
> > program.
>
> Deregulation? Airline deregulation, as Doug himself knows, has led to
> further concentration of capital along the lines alluded to in Lenin's
> pamphlet.
>
> > This isn't a popular view. But their critique of the nation - state
> > deserves serious attention. For example, though there are undoubtedly
> > progressive aspects to classic national liberation struggles -- those
> > directed against colonial powers -- it's a recurrent fact of history
> > that once established, nation - states thrive on creating new
> > hierarchies, and by excluding, to some degree or other, those not
> > deemed members of the tribe.
>
> Spartacist League crapola.
>
> > acting alone. One of the points of a book like Empire is to try to
> > make some connections -- to connect the dots between the visible
> > rebellions, and to recode all the less-visible dispersed instances of
> > rebellion as nodes in a common struggle against exploitation and
> > tedium.
>
> Connect the dots? That's not what's needed. What's needed is a fighting
> organization of socialist revolutionaries across the planet, not a couple
> of middle-class professors writing pretentious books for the cognoscenti.
>
> >
> > Surprisingly, Hardt and Negri have nothing to say about the newest
> > protest movements, those invoked by the single word "Seattle," but
> > which are much larger than that. Just last month, there were
> > demonstrations against the World Economic Forum in Davos -- and,
> > simultaneously, a popular counter-summit in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
>
> What are you talking about? These demonstrations were against
> globalization. Hardt and Negri state categorically that it is a mistake to
> protest globalization. We should welcome it into our hearts like Richard
> Dreyfus welcomed the spaceship in the final scene of "Close Encounters of
> the Third Kind".
>
> > thing one is fighting is abominable." They conclude the book by
> > invoking "love, simplicity, and also innocence" and "the
> > irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist."
>
> Communist. Right. Like Spinoza was a communist. Give me an effing break.
>
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
>
>
>
>      --- from list aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
>

--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx