Empire [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Perhaps it's a bit late to weigh in on Empire, but so many of the posted reviews strike me as so silly that I couldn't resist: most simply denounce or praise the authors for being "Marxist" or complain about the obscurantist writing. As for the first approach: who cares one way or another? Obviously Hardt and Negri aren't just repeating what Marx said, and why should they? (On the other hand, it's ridiculous to pretend that someone could analyze contemporary capitalism without referring to Marx.) Anyway, there is no general, systematic "framework" called Marxism, that you could accept or reject wholesale. Marx himself wasn't a Marxist, as everyone knows!

As for the writing, I've been surprised by how frequently people attack its academicism: anyone familiar with Negri's previous work can tell that he's dumbed down the arguments a fair amount, which has sometimes deprived them of some of their subtlety and rigor. It's a book of political philosophy, not the latest pot-boiler from your average journalist. I don't think it's elitist to ask the general public to grapple with a difficult work--I'm sure most are quite capable of it!

As for Empire itself: I think Negri has made a major misstep. The basic argument is simple (another reason I don't see its intellectualism--everyone has at least gotten the major point). Negri has made himself look pretty foolish coming out with a book in 2000 claiming that traditional imperialism is dead (the subsequent policies of George II's administration have forced Hardt and Negri to more or less admit they got it wrong in recent interviews). He seems to have gotten taken in by the liberal/social-democratic rhetoric of the 90s, which envisioned a super-state providing global capitalism with an international law. This was never anything but a reformist utopia, which projected a welfare-state compromise at the global level--after 20 years of Reagan-Thatcherism and neoliberalism at the national level!

Theoretically, then, Negri is just expanding on his old thesis of "real subsumption" (yes, the term is Marx's but Negri has elabrated a quite original interpretation), sprucing it up with a new theory of sovereignty. The claim--surrounded by so many qualifications and caveats that Hardt and Negri clearly don't really buy the argument themselves and are hedging their bets--is that the nation-state, and hence imperialism in its old sense are rapidly declining, being replaced by an imperial sovereignty that is conceptually foggy and simply doesn't reflect empirical historical tendencies. The "nation-state" as an abstraction is as strong as ever--it's everywhere! Some actually existing nation-states are much stronger than others, however--in other words, the U.S., Western Europe, Japan, perhaps China and Russia, are still potentially (and in the case of the U.S. actually) imperialist powers. They will never coordinate themselves into a regulated global order, and even if they did, the global South would never accept such an order.

Negri used to argue back in the 80s that the form of sovereignty most appropriate to the era of real subsumption was the nuclear state, not some international social democracy. It seems to me he should have stuck with this line--if anything it's more true than ever today. The basic political unit is still the state, and there isn't a state out there that doesn't ardently desire some nukes! (By the way, as far as I can tell Hardt's main contribution to Empire is to bring in discussions of the "postmodernism" and "post-colonial" theory that is so popular in certain academic circles. An almost total waste of time.)

Overall, Empire is still fascinating in its suggestiveness and its grand syntheses. Even if you disagree with the argument, it is absorbing and thought-provoking reading.

"Empire", which is now going on five years, attempts in its atmospheric prose to elucidate a totalizing world view of the future of the global economy. What emerges is an optimistic, incurably Hegelian proposition that the current globalization of economics and society, despite its oppressive characteristics, are a necessary (and inevitable) stage of modern capitalist development which must exist in order to bring about the mobilization of the "multitude." Hardt and Negri's boundless faith in the eventual triumph of the "multitude" (i.e. proletariat) is definitively neo-Marxist and utopian. Hardt and Negri further view the struggle as cutting across culture, class, race, and nationality, and that it must be seen as as multi-disciplinary liberation.

Given today's bleak political environment dominated by a conservative, evangelical and thoroughly warlike United States, and a progressive dialogue principally limited to finding the faults of the power structure rather than offering any coherent alternative structures of political economy, I grasped "Empire's" cheery exposition of globalism as a necessary, if evil, transition to a utopian state like a drowning man to a raft.

The problem - or a problem - with "Empire" is that it is like the auntie's Christmas fruitcake, likely to sit on one's shelf, only partly eaten, glowering sullenly until finally stashed away. If I still taught political science, I would torture my students with this book, much as I was tortured with Althusser and Foucault, the bread and butter of 1960s academic Marxists. Marxism remains a very valuable tool of historical criticism, as evidenced by such present-day historians as Eric Hobsbawm and Howard Zinn. As a predictive tool of historical development, and as a societal endpoint, it requires tremendous and unqualified leaps of faith and adaptations which are hard to relate to reality. When pressed to explain what the "liberated multitude" would look like, it is anyone's guess. If this is the anti-globalist Bible, as one reviewer so expressively states, there better be a thick codex to go with it.

There are plenty of good observations in "Empire" of the development of globalism and the erosion of nation-state dichotomies, but this is not particularly revolutionary. In fact, what is surprising is Hardt and Negri's faithfulness to conventional Marxist conversations regarding the future of the "proletariat" and the "working class." Likewise, they fall into the trap of characterizing the national liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s as some sort of organic global challenge to capitalist economies, when in fact, wars such as Algeria, Angola and Vietnam were anti-colonial and distinctly nationalist. Given the chance, political autonomy ranked far higher to these emerging states than faithfulness to socialist equity. Indeed, unless one has lived as an academic hermit or (maybe this is a cheap shot at Negri) in a prison cell, capitalist corporatism is as triumphant as it has ever been.

"Empire's" analytical flaws are not hard to uncover. I had to wince at points where Negri points to the "Los Angeles uprising" (the spasm of a riot following the acquittal of Rodney King's police assaulters) as a historical event on a par with the liberation of South Africa, or opportunistically observing that rap music is the emerging voice of the liberated "multitude" (obviously Negri has not seen Spike Lee's "Bamboozled."). Unlike the late Edward Said who was unparalleled at interweaving culture and political economy with uncanny precision ("Orientalism", "The Culture of Imperialism"), Hardt and Negri mostly engage in trivialities.

The opacity of most of the prose in "Empire" is, unfortunately, endemic to European neo-Marxist theory after the 1970s. What appears on first reading as precise diction is actually quite imprecise, yielding any number of interpretations which can be shaped to fit evidentiary data or events (to the extent such data exists). Paragraphs typically start with a declarative statement introducing a "paradigm" but then we are told that the reality is "less clear", subject to "disarticulation" or complex "matrices." From page 319:

"In Empire, as indeed was also the case in modern and ancient regimes, the constitution itself is a site of struggle, but today the nature of that site and that struggle is by no means clear. The general outlines of today's imperial constitution can be conceived in the form of a rhizomatic and universal communication network in which relations are established to and from all its points or nodes. Such a network seems paradoxically to be at once completely open and completely closed to struggle and intervention." Say what? I thought asparagus was a rhizome. As good Marxist scholastics, Negri and Hardt are consummate name droppers, which frequent references propel the footnotes and the narrative, while reducing to tears the average reader whose Foucault is still in the boxes of books left over from grad school. The frequent references to authors such as Delenze and Habermas are of little value to readers who do not have their shelves crammed full of such works, let alone actually read them. Each such reference, of course, is a meaningful shorthand for a cascade of complex ideas which becomes immediately lost to the uninitiated.

In the final analysis, though, "Empire", while an entertaining utopian epic, is topically irrelevant. Since the end of the Cold War, the upward struggles of the "multitude" have been overshadowed by the epic battle for resource domination (oil) in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. After 2001, this struggle in turn has been exacerbated by the medievalist religious conflict between Wahabist Islam and Puritan America. In no way did (or could) Hardt and Negri foresee the grim, gray "forever war" now undertaken by the United States, perverting the wartime command economy created over a half-century ago by Roosevelt into a mechanism to channel untold revenue to a select circle of military-industrial corporations. This, not Negri's, is the real story of Empire.

This dense and philosophically avant-garde tome is nonetheless passionate and compulsively readable, I found that I could not put it down after I picked it up. Even more remarkable is the facility with which Negri and Hardt facilitate both the history of the west and our contemporary postmodern terrain. Their central thesis is that the form of sovereignity that has characterized modernity is ending and that that there is a new form of sovereignity forming which they term 'Empire'. In doing this they examine Machiavelli, Spinoza, the founders of the U.S. political system, Marx, Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Bill Gates and many others in creative blend of materialism, history, radical politics and philosophy. The criticisms of post-structuralist and postcolonial theory are especially timely. If you are tired of coventional liberal politics try this book headlined by Italy's most famous living philosopher and political prisoner - Toni Negri.