Re: Hardt & Negri on Genoa

(posted to the Marxism list by Henry Liu)

In celebrating the divinity of Christ, the organized Church successfully
purges the secular revolutionary content of Jesus of Nazareth. Similarly,
the Church canonized Francis of Assisi as a lover of animals to distract
from his identification of holiness with poverty.

Time Magazine has found in Empire a work that focuses on Marx's description
of historical capitalism as a progressive force in the dialectic
destruction of feudalism, but happily ignores Marx's real message of
communism playing a similar role against capitalism. Hardt and Negri has
given capitalism its 9th life by applying "Marxist" interpretations to
globalization under financial capitalism. Hardt and Negri reject any
movement that makes concessions to the idea that "Local differences
preexist the present scene and must be defended or protected against the
intrusion of globalization." (Empire, p. 45)

On efforts to soft-pedal Marx, Lenin wrote (courtesy of Charles Brown):
"What is now happening to Marx's teaching has, in the course of history,
happened repeatedly to the teachings of revolutionary thinkers and leaders
of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation. During the lifetime of
great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them,
received their teachings with the most savage malice, the most furious
hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their
death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize
them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the
"consolation" of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the
latter, while at the same time emasculating the essence of the
revolutionary teaching, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
At the present time, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the
working-class movement concur in this "doctoring" of Marxism. They omit,
obliterate and distort the revolutionary side of this teaching, its
revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems
acceptable to the bourgeoisie."

The reality is that neither globalization or cyberspace are as centerless
as Hardt and Negri claim. No one can access the Internet without paying
$19.95 a month to an ISP, while over 1.4 billion people still subsist on
less than $1/day; and globalization is driven primarily by dollar hegemony.
20% of the global population use 80% of the resources of the whole planet.
Eleven millions children die each year from malnutrition. Some
intellectuals thinks that the invention of new terms (such as
deterritorialization) can overwhelm simple truths with new complexity. The
depersonalization of oppressors makes systemic oppression natural. The law
of the jungle is not the fault of the lion. Yet escaping from the law of
the jungle is the purpose of civilized progress, not a return to it.
The fundamentals are really quite simple. Large numbers of people are still
starving, dying from chronic mal-nutrition, lack of medical care for
curable diseases, trapped in perpetual poverty and denied access to
education in a world of production overcapacity, food surplus and
information technology. Yet globalization under financial capitalism
continues to seek increased production efficiency by retarding the
distribution of wealth. In a world of insufficient demand, economic
activities are still driven only by strengthening incentives for more
supply, i.e. higher return on capital. Profit is achieved by depressing
wages and increasing unemployment which in turn lower profits by reducing
aggregate demand. In an age of artificial intelligence that can build
machines that can think and design other machines, we continue to entertain
the notion that some workers are unemployable due to a lack of skill.
Prices are kept stable not by lowering profit or unreal levels of
price-earning ratios for equity, but by keeping unemployment high and
working wages low. Finance capitalism is merely profiting from the poverty
created by 19th century imperialism and neo-liberalism rationalizes
exploitation as a better alternative to starvation.

Slavoj Zizek, in an essay that was published in Germany, wrote that
"Empire" is nothing less than the Communist Manifesto for the 21st century:
"Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge)--a book that attempts to
write the communist manifesto anew for the 21st Century. Hardt and Negri
describe globalization as an ambiguous "deteritorialization": victorious
global capitalism penetrates into every pore of our social lives, into the
most intimate of spheres, and installs a never-present dynamic, which no
longer is based on patriarchal or other hierarchic structures of dominance.
Instead, it creates a flowing, hybrid identity. On the other hand, this
fundamental corrosion of all important social connections lets the genie
out of the bottle: it sets in motion potential centrifugal forces that the
capitalist system is no longer able to fully control. It is exactly because
of the global triumph of the capitalist system that that system is today
more vulnerable than ever. The old formula of Marx is still valid:
Capitalism digs its own grave. Hardt and Negri describe this process as the
transition from the nation-state to global empire, a transnational space
which is comparable to Rome, where hybrid masses of scattered identities
develop."

Little wonder that Finance Capitalism welcomes the appearance of this book.
If capitalism digs its own grave, there is no need for agitation or
revolution, or even resistance. The de-emphasis of nation state is part of
the strategy to promote the new imperialism. Nationalism emerged at the end
of WWII as an unstoppable force for the destruction of 19th century
colonialism/imperialism. Globalization aims at bypassing national
sovereignty by forcing open national markets and establishing transnational
production to exploit new surplus labor. Hardt and Negri reject any
movement that makes concessions to the idea that "Local differences
preexist the present scene and must be defended or protected against the
intrusion of globalization." Localism and nationalism are the defense
vehicles against incoming globalism. The American Constitutionalism that
H&N profess so much faith has not done much for African Americans in two
centuries. How many centuries would the Third World have to wait under
globalization? The postmodernist turn within Marxism asserts the futility
of organizing socialism on the basis of the nation-state. Empire, despite
the self-conscious attempt by the authors to position the book as a
Communist Manifesto for the 21st century, is devoid of economic analysis,
quite the opposite of the Communist Manifesto. Lenin in organizing the 3rd
International, had a theoretical base derived from his "Imperialism, the
Final Stage of Capitalism", which offered details on the emergence of
corporate trusts, drawing liberally from J.A. Hobson and Rudolf Hilferding.
"Empire" refers to postmodernists such as Baudrillard, Celine, Arendt,
Polybius et al., but no economic facts or theories of note.

Yet in an interview, Zikek himself denies the impact of virtual
communities.

Zizek:
---
http://www.ctheory.com/article/a037.html
The so-called "virtual communities" are not such a great revolution as it
might appear. What impresses me is the extent to which these virtual
phenomena retroactively enable us to discover to what extent our self has
always been virtual. Even the most physical self-experience has a symbolic,
virtual element in it. For example playing sex games. What fascinates me is
that the possibility of satisfaction already counts as an actual
satisfaction. A lot of my friends used to play sex games on Minitel in
France. They told me that the point is not really to meet a person, not
even to masturbate, but that just typing your fantasies is the fascination
itself. In the symbolic order the potentiality already gives actual
satisfaction. In psychoanalytic theory the notion of symbolic castration is
often misunderstood. The threat of castration as to its effects, acts as a
castration. Or in power relations, where the potential authority forms the
actual threat. Take Margaret Thatcher. Her point was that if you don't rely
on state support but on your individual resources, luck is around the
corner. The majority didn't believe this, they knew very well that most of
them would remain poor. But it was enough to be in a position where they
might succeed.

The idea that you were able to do something, but didn't, gives you more
satisfaction than actually doing it. In Italy, it is said to be very
popular during the sexual act that a woman tells a man some dirty
fantasies. It is not enough that you are actually doing it, you need some
fantasmatic, virtual support. "You are good, but yesterday I fucked another
one and he was better..." What interests me are the so-called
sado-masochistic, ritualized, sexual practices. You never go to the end,
you just repeat a certain foreplay. Virtual in the sense that you announce
it, but never do it. Some write a contract. Even when you are doing it, you
never lose control, all the time you behave as the director of your own
game. What fascinates me is this Spaltung, this gap in order to remain a
certain distance. This distance, far from spoiling enjoyment makes it even
more intense. Here I see great possibilities for the VR stuff.
In the computer I see virtuality, in the sense of symbolic fiction,
collapsing. This notion has a long tradition. In Bentham's panopticon we
find virtuality at its purest. You never know if somebody is there in the
centre. If you knew someone was there, it would have been less horrifying.
Now's it's just an "utterly dark spot," as Bentham calls it. If someone is
following you and you're not sure, it is more horrible than if you know
that there is somebody. A radical uncertainty.
---

So virtual liberation or revolution would be just thinking about it but
never doing it.

In a chat session, the two authors had the following to say"
http://www.net-i.org/archive/msg00102.html

A. Negri: "The concept of Empire and all the other hypotheses that we make
are meant to reveal the present state of order, but this isn't what's
really important. What's really important is the Augustinian idea of two
cities; that is, Exodus on one hand (fleeing the corrupt city of power),
but also constructing a new city. Now we're in the stage where we can't yet
see its outline, we are crossing borders and haven't yet arrived."

A. Negri: "We didn't write a treatise on political economy, but tried to
grasp the general outlines of our post-colonial and post-national
realities. Therefore, the concept of accumulation was not at the centre of
our analysis. Certainly one can and should imagine a concept of
accumulation within our framework that would be defined as the entire
ensemble of social labor, both material labor and immaterial labor that is
organised today. To me it seems that at this point we can only understand
accumulation as a pre-em to a communist constitution of society. To be
frank and clear: Empire exploits the maximum co-operation of society for
accumulation; it exploits the foundation of communism."

It appears that exploitation is the key word. H&N declare that the time of
proletarian revolution is over, that the Communist Manufesto is dead. The
message of Empire is: when exploitation is unavoidable, relax and enjoy it.
Lest we should forget, it was not too long ago that a teenage boy in Harlem
killed another boy for a pair of $80 Nike sneakers which was probably made
by another child in Indonesia for 5 cents. The center is not as powerless
as H&N supposes. Demonstrators are being shot and killed in Genoa.

Henry C.K. Liu