Re: Hardt & Negri on Genoa

I'm not quite sure why I'm so perturbed by this and the previous 
post, so I hope my rambling can be forgiven. As the fact that I 
haven't read Hardt-Negri, picking bits and pieces from a short 
article here and an interview there.

But perhaps I'm perturbed because the posts strike me as increasingly 
rear-guard attempts to keep re-affirming old truths which are 
increasingly inadequate to the changing realities around us, rather 
than attempts to develop old, apparently still adequate methods of 
analysis, to encompass the new realities.

Along the way, we have some partial canards, plus a mix-and-match to 
fit the argument rather than the reality.

Thus, to say that after Marx's death, attempts were made to convert 
him into a harmless icon, to canonise him, etc. is just plain false. 
Makes one wonder where the writer was up until 1989 or thereabouts. 
Marx can now be quoted by Time, etc. simply because, in the eyes of 
the multitude, he has become irrelevant. Need one add that in many 
ways, responsibility for that irrelevance lies as much with the 
epigones as with the oppressors? At its most harmless (?), it's to do 
with the tiresome way in which the epigones would pick up something 
and attempt to show that it was already covered by the old man. Thus 
it was with the environment, when so many rushed back to C.III and 
spun a paragraph or two out into something to show that it was all 
there; so also with gender, and so on. Is it so terrible to 
acknowledge that the old man didn't produce a text(s) for all time?

But it is also a canard to suggest that in his life time he was 
rejected -- what are all those volumes of writings from the Herald 
Tribune, etc. about? Was that paper the paper of the proletariat? 
Indeed, what proportion of the proletariat then could even afford the 
paper, or could read? Moreover, Marx's writings on India and China 
must have provided some solace to the empire builders, and helped 
them sell the 'civilising mission' to the masses of the day. Would 
that fact alone be sufficient grounds to say that Marx was wrong? Is 
Hardt-Negri, or anyone else for that matter, wrong because they are 
picked up in bits and pieces by the NYT or Time? We should have 
rejected the Pentagon Papers then, when the Washington Post carried 
it, should have rejected all those images of Vietnam carried by the 
ruling class media of CBS, voiced over by Walter Cronkite?

As for the mix-and-match, curious to see that the writer would 
apparently approve of "Local differences pre-exist the present scene 
and must be defended or protected against the intrusion of 
globalisation". But in so approving of it, isn't it the case that one 
accepts the canard that globalisation today is all new, rather than 
yet another transformation of a process that has gone on for a long, 
long time -- and one which in another era, Marx himself of course 
approved of, whether rightly or wrongly is a separate issue?

Curious, too, that this defence of "local differences" then approves 
of the nation-state and the system of nation-states, that product of 
another period of globalisation, an institution that has been as 
guilty of erasing "local differences" in the attempt to homogenise 
the national, as were the imperialists. Indeed, in some instances, 
the imperialists actually provided shelter for the "local 
differences" against the homogenising intent of the nationalists. 
Moreover, it is the existence of these nation-states and their 
borders which creates the wage differentials which global capital 
utilises to its advantage. The fact is that transnational capital 
usually pays above the national average wage rate, in the process 
sometimes pricing local capital out of the market for skilled labour. 
 From the little I've seen, it strikes me that Hardt-Negri have their 
finger on something when they focus on the trans-border movement of 
people, a process which, if unleashed, may well do more to equalise 
wage rates across the world than campaigns to get transnationals to 
pay in accordance with American wage rates which would 'distort' 
local price structures such that dependence upon transnational 
capital would become total, something which is already happening at 
the managerial end.

The same with this repetition of the less than USD1 -- note the 
denomination, USD -- figure, replete with all its assumptions of 
accounting and calculation. I do not dismiss the fact of massive 
poverty in the world. But this USD1 figure, while a good sound bite 
and wonderful for propaganda purposes, does ride roughshod over the 
local. I know of groups where I am who do live on less than USD1 or 
USD2 a day per person -- depends on how one counts and account for 
what is their income, since so much of their income would not pass 
through the grid of national accounting, and slip through the income 
surveys. Should they continue to live that way? I may not think so, 
but the only way that they can get away from living that way is to 
enter the capitalist labour market with all that that implies.

Should we not also recognise that to address some of the problems 
identified -- of health and infant mortality, of education (a term 
used most unself-consciously to mean formal schooling, as if "local 
peoples" didn't have education), etc. -- is itself to participate in, 
to urge, a globalising of systems of medical practice, of schooling 
practice, etc.? Unless of course the 'Marxists' are all in favour of 
shamanistic practices. That -- with tongue fully in cheek -- the 
movement against child labour drives against the "local" where people 
as young as 12, or less, would in the pre-existing locally different 
have been working in the fields, or joining in hunting parties, 
gathering wild crops, etc., picking up the local skills along the 
way, and to drive them into the schools is to sever them from that 
system of informal education, and to condemn them to be the 
underclass of the modern capitalist economy since the vast majority 
are not going to complete, and even if they complete are not going to 
obtain the 'right' certification for the better-paying jobs? But of 
course the movement against child labour is thinking of child labour 
in the capitalist economy -- and yes, there is a fate worse than 
full-blown capitalism, and that's a half-baked capitalism, caught in 
a limbo -- the religious version of which has it as a place of no 
exit, can't go to heaven, can't go to hell, and can't return to 
earth, can't even do a stint a purgatory.

It is also depressing to be told that globalisation currents are all 
about Coca-Cola, Macdonald's, etc. Not to mention that it manifests a 
curious lack of faith in the local and in local people. Five 
centuries ago, the Indian curries which we all love today were made 
with pepper, not chillies. Yet who today can imagine curries with 
pepper and not chillies? But then, equally, that quintessential 
English practice of tea didn't exist five centuries ago.

In point of fact, the current globalisation currents are about who -- 
not just what -- moves, and under what conditions, and how those 
moves do undermine the nation-state. For the -- how would one label 
them? -- the managerial classes, the nation-state is increasingly 
coming to resemble a club in which membership is optional. Thus, an 
accountant with Citibank can live and work in NY or London, Tokyo or 
Singapore, with retirement perhaps on the Gold Coast -- and indeed 
the more mobile, the more successful. For these, there is 
increasingly an equalisation of remuneration, with all the attendant 
effects upon the possibilities for the locally confined multitudes -- 
yes, I like the term as it seems to capture something.

Repeating the mantra of exploitation is not going to get us anywhere, 
nor is continued insistence that it is a capital-labour relation. 
There has been exploitation from way back when, and the 
capital-labour relation has been around for some time as well. It is 
the specific modalities of it that are going to tell us how we may 
get out of it.

kj khoo