Argentine take on Hardt-Negri

I just received a lengthy article from an Argentine comrade that answers
Hardt and Negri, along with Arrighi. It is too long to forward to email
lists, but I have put it on my website at:
http://www.marxmail.org/arrighi_hardt.htm

Here is a brief excerpt:

-----

Estrategia Internacional Abril 2001

Empire or Imperialism? A debate with Giovanni Arrighi's "Long Twentieth
Century" Michael Hardt's and Toni Negri's "Empire"

By Juan Chingo and Gustavo Dunga

The downplaying of the structural contradictions inherent in the capitalist
mode of production and the overestimation of the subject are manifested in
the new theoretical scheme proposed by Negri and Hardt to define the
"Empire" as a new phase of capitalism that leaves imperialism behind.
Breaking up the dialectic unity between the relationships of production and
the class struggle, they attempt a recreation of materialism that is
vitiated by the hypertrophy of the subject, a subjectivists theory where
the structure holds no barriers, it does not constraint the human agency,
even more, the former is a mere consequence of his action. 

This can be clearly seen when the Italian philosopher and his literary co
thinker claim that: "Theories of the passages to and beyond imperialism
that privilege the pure critique of the dynamics of capital risk
undervaluing the power of the real efficient motor that drives capitalist
development from its deepest core: the movements and struggles of the
proletariat...History has a logic only when subjecitivity rules it, only
when (as Nietzsche says) the emergence of subjectivity reconfigures
efficient causes and final causes in the development of history. The power
of the proletariat consists precisely in this...The old analyises of
imperialism will not be sufficient here because in the end they stop at the
threshold of the analysis of subjectivity and concentrate rather on the
contradictions of capital's own developmet. We need to identify a
theoretical schema that puts the subjectivity of the social movements of
the proletariat at center stage in the processes of globalization and the
constitution of global order." The emphasis between the role played by
structural contradictions and the conscious human agency, of working out
organic crises, has been displaced from the former to the latter throughout
the centuries through which the history of mankind has unfolded. In the
epoch of proletarian revolution, the subjective factor acquires a decisive
role. The transformation heralded by proletarian revolution constitutes the
most conscious step humanity has ever taken. The transition from feudalism
to capitalism, in a certain way, is in-between (in the sense that the take
over of the means of production comes before the seizing of political power
by the bourgeoisie) when compared to the downfall of the Roman Empire and
the Russian Revolution. Nonetheless, in spite of the predominant role
played by the subjective factor -and its most developed form: the
organization of the masses in soviets as organs of power led by a
revolutionary party- one cannot appraise the outcome of these
transformations through endowing subjectivity with an absolute power as a
change agent in the world. Such is the view the Bolsheviks had of
themselves: "one of the historical factors, its 'conscious' factor, a very
important but not a decisive one. We have never sinned of historical
subjectivism. We regarded the class struggle -standing on the basis
provided by the productive forces- as the decisive factor, not only at a
national level but also internationally."

Negri and Hardt relapse in such historical subjectivism when they claim
that: "History has a logic only when subjecitivity rules it, only when (as
Nietzsche says) the emergence of subjectivity reconfigures efficient causes
and final causes in the development of history". Their subjectivism,
however, is of a different type to that mentioned in Trotsky's quote
mentioned above. It is not a subjectivism relying on a revolutionary party.
It is neither a strand of subjectivism stemming from the revolutionary
maturity or learning of the working class, i.e., the process of becoming a
class for itself from a class in itself, the achievement of its political
independence with regards to the bourgeoisie, which only can be brought
about through the experience of the class itself and its bound with a
revolutionary party. This is not the case with Negri and Hardt,, for whom
the becoming of the subject does not hinge upon these achievements, but
rather on ever-present grounds for liberation.

Building on a logic of an unreal subject ("the multitude") that bears no
correspondence at all with an empirically-set subject, they proceed to blur
the objective positions of the different exploited classes within the
capitalist mode of production, the centrality of the proletariat in
particular as the social subject of the socialist revolution. Such
phantom-like subject built by them, omnipresent and pure potential, has no
need for programmes, strategic and tactics, let alone a revolutionary party
to accomplish its historic mission.

Hence, when the authors of Empire are faced with the setting of the early
80s and most of the 90s, when neoliberalism gained momentum and the actual
subject is in retreat and atomized, a far cry from the "constituent flames"
of the 70s, their theoretical framework turns out to be completely unable
to deal with reality. This comes to light when they explain why the U.S.
has been able to hold on to its hegemony throughout the crisis. Thus, they
claim that "The answer lies in large part, perhaps paradoxically, not in
the genius of U.S. politicians or capitalists, but in the power and
creativity of the U.S. proletariat...in terms of the paradigm of
international capitalist command, the U.S. proletariat appears as the
subjective figure that expressed most fully the desires and needs of
international or multinational workers. Against the common wisdom that the
U.S. proletariat is weak because of its low party and union representation
with respect to Europe and elsewhere, perhaps we should see it as strong
for precisely those reasons. Working-class power resides not in the
representative institutions but in the antagonism and autonomy of the
workers themselves...In order to understand the continuation of U.S.
hegemony, then, it is not sufficient to cite the relations of force that
U.S. capitalism wielded over the capitalists in other countries. U.S.
hegemony was actually sustained by the antagonistic power of the U.S.
proletariat" . 

This is really surprising. If there is a place where the bourgeoisie in the
last twenty years has been able to overcome the fetters imposed by labour
onto accumulation, that place is the U.S. As the Reagan onslaught unfolded,
and later continued into the 90s, the American workers endured a massive
retreat through a combination of defeats and the fear of the 1979-82
recession that brought about a hike of unemployment. It led to a big loss
of conquests, a massive wage loss, the lengthening of the working day,
which as a whole allowed for a significant increase of the rate of
exploitation and a recovery of corporate profits. It is these factors that
account for the relative strength of the U.S. in the face of its
competitors and also lay the basis for its continued hegemony -along with
the U.S. privileged position within the world finance system. Nonetheless,
the analysis proposed by Negri and Hardt writes off this material reality,
replacing it by a subjectivist approach. Thus, the objective balance of
forces between the classes is replaced by the "desires" of the workers. As
to the trade union and political level, it is true that the union and
political representatives of the European workers is a reformist one or has
been bought off by the bourgeoisie. 

But celebrating the weakness of the trade union organization and the lack
of any class representation in the American bipartisan system as proof of
strength is nonsensical. The low level of organization of the American
working class is the result of a fierce opposition of the American
bourgeoisie to giving the slightest right of organization to the workers on
one hand, and the political and conservative backwardness of the working
class stemming from the dominant position of the U.S., on the other. As we
see, autonomism and its ultrasubjectivist approach, whose historical origin
goes back to the euphoria of the struggles in the 60s and the 70s combined
with the (justified) repulsion of many left Marxist intellectuals with
Althusser's structuralism and anti-humanism, is totally unable to
understand the present-day world.


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org