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

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)

Every effort to expand on their definition of ontology only leads to more
confusion. Supposedly postmodern capitalism is distinguished from plain old
capitalism by its tendency to create surplus value all over the world
rather than a single country like in the good old days. Because capital is
now everywhere (and implicitly nowhere), the creation of value takes place
*beyond measure*. In other words, we lack the epistemological basis to
quantify prices, wages, interest rates, inflation, etc. I suppose this
explains the rather embarrassing lack of economic data in "Empire". By
supplying something as mundane as a graph illustrating capital flows
between the core and the periphery, they would be guilty of failing to
comply with the postmodernist rule against trying to know the unknowable.

Just to make sure everybody understands what this 'beyond measure' thing
means, they say, "Beyond measure refers to *the new place in the
non-place*, the place defined by the productive activity that is synonymous
from any external regime of measure. Beyond measure refers to a
*virtuality* that invests the entire biopolitical fabric of imperial
globalization." Oh, I see. Can you imagine the chore that the editor at
Harvard Press had on her (most likely, right?) when wading through this
kind of squid-ink prose. After now having spent the better part of a month
reading and writing about "Empire", I think I have mastered this stuff myself:

"With the advent of the epistemological break wrought by global
telecommunications, biopolitical relations are inverted on the basis of
network forms that are rhizomic in nature. The hierarchical ties of the
Fordist world are exchanged for a *informational* structure that
approximates the reciprocal relations between gods and men in Ovid's
Metamorphosis. From the Myth of Sisyphus we begin to understand the despair
felt by Walter Benjamin who took his life in protest against the Nazi
regime of localized ultra-Fordism."

Interspersed among their high-falutin' metaphysical speculations, you have
attempts to sketch out some kind of practical politics, which leave more to
be desired than the ontology. Their practical politics can be summarized as
"going with the flow" insofar as the flow is defined as the process known
as globalization. Rather than showing solidarity with the likes of Jose
Bove, the French farmer who busted up a Macdonalds, they believe that
capitalist homogenization is not a bad thing at all. This kind of
resistance against fast food and all it stands for is fundamentally
reactionary because it promotes a attachment to national sovereignty,
including cuisine. Who knows, a crepes suzette might lead to a swastika if
you don't watch out. (This does not even begin to address questions of how
global capitalism is devastating peripheral agri-export based nations.)

They write "The multitude's resistance to bondage--the struggle against the
slavery of belonging to a nation, an identity, and a people, and thus the
desertion from sovereignty and the limits it places on subjectivity--is
entirely positive." Of course, with the IMF and World Bank trampling
national sovereignty underfoot across the planet from Argentina to
Yugoslavia, it is not too difficult to understand why the NY Times would
play up "Empire". Where else would you get a "Marxist" defense of the
notion that *all* efforts to defend national sovereignty are reactionary.
It is one thing to defend this notion with respect to Great Britain or the
United States, it is another to defend it with respect to a nation that is
being raped by multinational corporations. Under such circumstances,
old-fashioned slogans like "Vietnam for the Vietnamese" still have resonance.

Just to make sure that everybody understands their drift, they defend
"nomadism" and "miscegenation". "Nomadism"--as in Mexican workers being
smuggled across the border in oven-like trucks--is contrasted to the
"regressive" and "fascistic" desire to reinforce the walls of nation, race,
people, etc. So implicitly, the best thing would be for everybody in the
world to jump in bed with everybody else so to end up with a "mixed race"
population that can go anywhere in the world and take part in the global
capitalist informational economy. By this standard, a mulatto data entry
clerk in Ghana working for Aetna Life Insurance would be an exemplar of the
brave new world of Empire.

Obviously what's missing from this schema is class criteria. For oppressed
nationalities like the American Indian or the East Timorese, the desire for
sovereignty is progressive. We must be able to distinguish the desire for
Blackfoot Indians to transmit knowledge of their endangered language to
their children from the desire of US corporations to make English a lingua
franca.

In Ziauddin Sardar's "Postmodernism and the Other: the New Imperialism of
Western Culture" (Pluto Press), you can find a powerful rebuttal to the
sort of nonsense put forward by Hardt and Negri:

"The assumption that the flow of ideas between the west and the non-west is
equal and will lead to a richness of cultures at worst and a 'synthesis' of
cultures and traditions is widespread in postmodern writings and thought.
However, the flow of cultural ideas and products, as those of commodities
and goods, is strictly one-way: from the west to the Third World. One
doesn't see an Indian Michael Jackson, a Chinese Madonna, a Malaysian
Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Moroccan Julia Roberts, Filipino 'New Kids on the
Block', a Brazilian Shakespeare, an Egyptian Barbara Cartland, a Tanzanian
'Cheers', a Nigerian 'Dallas', a Chilean 'Wheel of Fortune', or Chinese
opera, Urdu poetry, Egyptian drama, etc. on the global stage. The global
theater is strictly a western theater, a personification of western power,
prestige and control. Those non-western individuals who occasionally get
walk-on parts are chosen for their exotica or because they specifically
subscribe to western ideas and ideals, or promote a western cause. When
non-western cultural artefacts appear in the west, they do so strictly as
ethnic chic or empty symbols." (p. 22)

In contrast to "modernist" thinkers who fretted about the crisis and decay
of Europe (Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Ortega y Gasset, et al), postmodernists
like Hardt and Negri regard the replacement of the old "imperialist"
systems based on the nation-state by Empire to be a good thing basically:

"From out standpoint, however, the fact that against the old powers of
Europe a new Empire has formed is only good news. Who wants to see any more
of that pallid and parasitic European ruling class that led directly from
the ancien régime to nationalism, from populism to fascism, and now pushes
for a generalized neoliberalism? Who wants to see more of those ideologies
and those bureaucratic apparatuses that have nourished and abetted the
rotting European élites? And those who still stand those systems of labor
organization and those corporations that have stripped away every vital
spirit." (p. 376)

One supposes that in a certain sense powerful trade unions in places like
Sweden, France and Germany were obstacles to the "refusal to work". When
one places the prospects of an apprenticeship in a machine shop side by
side with taking heroin in a Berlin squat, the latter would best qualify as
an expression of the "vital spirit". With the collapse of social democracy,
one will have plenty of opportunities to hail "nomadism" and "refusal to
work" all across Europe. Just watch out for the skinheads.

One of the modernist "Europe is sick" thinkers who receives special
attention from Hardt and Negri is a bit of a surprise: Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Rather than seeing him as others do, as an epistemologist looking for an
adequate basis for establishing 'verifiable' propositions, he is the
quintessential mystic whose early writings are a search for meaning and
transcendence. In the midst of WWI, Wittgenstein wrote, "How things stand,
is God. God is, how things stand. Only from the consciousness of the
uniqueness of my life arises religion--science--and art."

In contrast to this nearly Kierkegaardian plea, you have other thinkers who
"would perpetuate the crisis through an illusory faith in Soviet
modernization." While the diligent reader of "Empire" would have become
inured at this point to the lack of economic data, one can only be shocked
by lack of familiarity with Wittgenstein's real beliefs and attitudes with
respect to the Soviet Union. Rather than seeing him as a Christian mystic,
it is much more useful to see him as a man of his times. Like nearly every
other civilized human being, he looked for alternatives to Nazi barbarism.
This involved an engagement with Marxism that was the subject of a paper
given to a 'Capital and Class' conference in 1998 by David R. Andrews
titled "Commodity Fetishism as a Form of Life".

Andrews notes that according to someone who knew Wittgenstein well in the
1930s, "he was opposed to [Marxism] in theory, but supported it in
practice;" and he is reported to have said: "I am a communist, at heart"
Also, for some time Wittgenstein explored the possibility of relocating to
the Soviet Union to live and at one point the University of Moscow offered
him a teaching position in philosophy.

The impact of the theory of Marxism on Wittgenstein’s philosophy is also
mixed. According to Wittgenstein, in his posthumously published
Philosophical Investigations,(Wittgenstein, 1958) Piero Sraffa was the most
important influence on his repudiation of the ideas of his earlier
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "I have been forced to recognize grave
mistakes in what I wrote in that first book . . . I am indebted to [the
criticism that] Mr. P. Sraffa, for many years unceasingly practised on my
thoughts.  I am indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas
of [the Investigations]." From his letters to Gramsci and from testimony by
Joan Robinson and others, it is becoming increasingly apparent that Sraffa
was in turn strongly influenced by Marx.

In the final pages of "Empire" you finally get a series of demands that the
mass movement is urged to adopt. These include:

1. The general right [of the multitude, a bit of jargon meant to indicate
the new working class and its allies] to control its own movement through
global citizenship.

2. A social wage and a guaranteed income for all.

3. The right to reappropriation. This means the right of workers to have
free access to and control the means of production of knowledge,
communication, information, etc.

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.

Louis Proyect
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