Re: Hardt-Negri's "Empire": a Marxist critique, part 4 (conclusion)

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 10/07/01 16:21 +0300, you wrote:
> Forwarded from Louis Proyect:
>
>
> Hardt-Negri's "Empire": a Marxist critique, part 4
> (conclusion)


Thanks to Michael Keaney for forwarding the fourth and last part of this
critique by Louis Proyect, which I would now like to comment on. The
critique is clearly intended to be in the public realm and to give some
firm answer to "Empire". It has the merit of bringing
differences up to date in the present. Apart from some variations of tone
between academic restraint and pithyness, it would be eminently suitable
after editing, for a publication, and no doubt may be.

 From what I can see of the Hardt-Negri book, "Empire" is
certainly a commodity, one that would appeal to the non-conformist
intelligentsia of the world. Its style is suggestive and allusive, giving
a feeling of pleasure that you are reading a foreign language, and much
to your surprise, you can understand most of what is being said. It is
not a modernist agenda for world revolution. But it may be a post
modernist contribution to one.

A few markers:

It is not practical to take other parts of the critique in detail but one
passage in part 1 is IMHO of course clearly wrong and means that LP would
be unable to see the potentially radical nature of H&N's position,
even if they did spell it out more explicitly:

> Of
> course, now that the Soviet Union no longer exists, the United Nations
> is more than ever a tool of territorial and economic ambitions by the USA
> and its allies. Put in old-school Marxist terms, the UN is not an 
> _expression_ of Empire but imperialism. Power grabs by big fish in the
> ocean 
> at the expense of smaller fish--rather than Kantian pieties--is the only
> way to understand the United Nations.


The conclusion of the critique similarly fails to meet H&N on their
own terms:

> Of course, the problem with these demands
> is that they are only meaningful
> when made on the government of a nation-state, particularly the demand
> for
> a guaranteed income. One can not simultaneously dismiss the nation-state
> as
> an arena of struggle and prioritize a demand that can only be
> realized
> through legislation at a national level. One supposes that this kind
> of
> mundane problem never entered the calculations of Hardt and Negri.
> In
> reality, the only organized force that can push for such demands in
> today's
> world is the organized working class whose trade unions they have
> already
> written off.

This simply fails to address the fact that the *class conscious* working
class is now not effectively organised even in trade unions. While in
past decades tu's have certainly been a vehicle for the transmission of
working class power, as Lenin pointed out they are also bourgeois
organisations, fighting for better conditions in the sale of labour power
as a commodity under capitalism. 

"With the decline of modernism, their position has been further
weakened.

Post modernism is pretty irritating. I note on Michael Hardt's website he
includes a picture of himself as he would have been photgraphed by
Botticelli, and has a bust of Karl Marx with a mobile phone. But this is
partly self-mockery.

Nevertheless LP simply does not analyse that if postmodernism is so
widespead, there is from a marxist point of view actually a material base
for this. The relations of production of late capitalism give rise to it.
On the surface subjectivity and presentation are everything. They were
important in previous societies and modes of production too, but the
removal of authority from all structure is a feature of late
capitalism.

If anyone wants to mock post modernism it is easy to do: quickest I would
suggest is in fact to try translating the Le Monde review of Empire back
into English with an automated internet translator.

But are H&N talking nonsense? No.

Two tests 

A) look up ultra-imperialism in the index. This is a crucial test because
their theory clearly in marxist terms looks like ultra imperialism. There
on p230-231with finesse but with specific attention to detail they deal
with Lenin, Hilferding and Kautsky. For my money it could be crisper
still. They do not, at least in this passage, emphasise that for Lenin
imperialism was not the annexing of agricultural territories but the
domination of finance capital, and they do not emphasise the fact that
Lenin described war between imperialisms as inevitable. They are more
interested in tracing the continuity of the radical ideas bearing in mind
the conditions of the time. But they do handle the question. I may have
speed-read LP's critique but I do not recall him doing so. Indeed in all
four parts, oddly, there is no reference to Kautsky.

B) Lenin argued, and I can never remember where, that if you are going to
criticise an opponent it is only worth really doing it at his best. Not
only does LP not grasp the nettle of Kautsky's theory of
ultra-imperialism. The opening of part 4 of LP's critique with typical
contempt argues 

> Like a hot air balloon detached from its
> moorings, part four of "Empire"
> sails into the stratosphere with empty metaphysical speculation even
> more
> divorced from the material world than the preceding three parts.
>
> There are extensive references to "ontology" and "the
> ontological" with
> apparently no recognition that Marx and Engels dispensed with these
> sorts
> of categories. Hart and Negri write:
>
> "In Empire, no subjectivity is outside, and all places have been
> subsumed
> in a general 'non-place.' The transcendental fiction of politics can
> no
> longer stand up and has no argumentative utility because we all
> exist
> entirely within the realm of the social and the political. When we
> recognize this radical determination of postmodernity, political
> philosophy
> forces us to enter the terrain of ontology." (p.
> 353-354)

Now if you go to the actual text the passage before that quoted, makes
quite sufficiently plain the sense in which H&N are arguing. Chapter
4.1 opens:

> In the course of our argument we have
> generally dealt with Empire in terms of a critique of what is and what
> exists, and thus in ontological terms. At times, however, in order to
> reinforce the argumentation, we have addressed the problematic of Empire
> with an ethico-political discourse, calculating the mechanics of passions
> and interests - for example, when early in our argument we judged Empire
> as less bad or better than the previous paradigm of power from the
> standpoint of the multitude. English political theory in the period from
> Hobbes to Hume presents perhaps the pradigmatic example of such an
> ethico-political discourse, which began from a pessimistic description of
> presocial human nature and attempted through reliance on a transcendental
> notion of power to establish the legitimacy of the state. The (more or
> less liberal) Leviathan is less bad with respect to the war of all
> against all, better because it establishes and preserves peace. This
> style of political theorizing, however, is no longer very useful. It
> pretends that the subject can be understood presocially and outside the
> community, and then imposes a kind of transcendental socialization on it.
> ..."

And then it continues with the quoted passage, making the context
clear.

Mockery is not serious criticism. 

There is much I do not understand about exactly what Hardt and Negri are
arguing but it is much more dialectical and contradictory than LP even
begins to suggest. 

Consider the sense of the dynamic underlying this third paragraph of the
book, which a reader will sense if he or she wishes it, even if, like me,
they have forgotten what the Peace of Westphalia was:

"It is widely recognized that the notion of international order
that European modernity continually proposed and reproposed, at least
since the Peace of Westphalia, is now in crisis. [helpful footnote at
this point] It has in fact always been in crisis, and this crisis has
been one of the motors that has continuously pushed toward Empire,
Perhaps this notion of international order and its crisis should be dated
from the time of the Napoleonic Wars, as some scholars claim, or perhaps
the origin should be located in the Congress of Vienna and the
establishment of the Holy Alliance. [fn] In any case, there can be no
doubt that by the time of the First World War and the birth of the League
of Nations, a notion of international order along with its crisis had
been definitively established. The birth of the United Nations at the end
of the Second World War merely reinitiated, consolidated, and extended
this developing international juridical order that was first European but
progressively became completely global. The United Nations, in effect,
can be regarded as the culmination of this entire constitutive process, a
culmination that both reveals the limitations of the notion of
*international* order and points beyond it towards a new notion of
*global* order. One could certainly analyze the UN juridical structure in
purely negative terms and dwell on the declining power of nation-states
in the inernational context, but one should also recognsise that the
notion or right defined by the UN Charter also points toward a new
positive source of juridical production, effective on a global scale - a
new center of normative production that can play a sovereign juridical
role. The UN functions as a hinge in the genealogy from international to
global juridical structures. On the one hand, the entire UN conceptual
structure is predicated on the recognition and legitimation of the
sovereingty of individual states, and it is thus planted squarely within
the old framework of international right defined by pacts and treaties.
On the other hand, however, this process of legitimation is effective
only insofar as it transfers sovereign right to a real *supranational*
center. It is not our intention here to criticize or lament the serious
(and at times tragic) inadequacies of this process; indeed, we are
interested in the United Nations and the project of international order
not as an end in itself, but rather as a real historical lever that
pushed forward the transition toward a properly global system. It
is  precisely the inadequacies of the process, then, that make it
effective."

My biggest reservation about the approach of H & N is that they
seem to let the USA off the hook when its hegemonism ought to be the
target of most progressive, perhaps all progressive global political
activity, but perhaps that would be too prescriptive and would therefore
confuse the argument that H&N are presenting about where the world
has currently got to and where it is moving. 

I personally find the ending as cloying as the photographs on Michael
Hardt's web page, but the "project of love" which they extol,
is none other than the love of human beings for one another, collective
solidarity. And that fundamentally is the answer to capitalism. As is
also the fact that dead labour rests on living labour, the day to day
labour of the working people.

The book is much more scrupulous than it appears but it entices from and
demands from the reader a sense of creativity. If people want to mock it,
they can, but developments are occuring in the world that are quite
unprecedented, unlike anything that has happened before in human history,
and we are unlikely to defeat capitalism if we are not creatively
receptive to these changes. 

That requires a dynamic and a critical consciousness which is more than a
mocking one. Spinoza, whom Hardt and Negri so much admire, had a
contradictory attitude to the multitude. H&N's own book is not
written as if was mere common sense. 

Out of the 1 billion members of the intelligentsia in the world it is
written I would guess for the 10% of them, say 100 million, who are
members of the radical non-conforming members of the intelligentsia. They
are now powerful enough, in the name of the larger multitude, to cripple
the workings of global capitalism until it submits to being tamed into a
new democratic world order. 

But Hardt and Negri do not write for every member of the larger
multitude. Of that larger multitude they might say, as Spinoza did:

"Therefore the multitude, and those of like passions with the
multitude, I ask not to read
my book; nay, I would rather that they should utterly neglect it, than
that they should misinterpret it
after their wont."

Chris Burford

London