Re: Hardt & Negri on Genoa

At 04:01 AM 7/21/2001 -0400, Boris Stremlin wrote:
>The point about Marx's appearance in the Herald Tribune has already been
>well made (Marx also used to smoke cigars and wear suits, I hear).

Marx wrote for the Herald Tribune to make a living, as did a number of 
Trotskyists write for Luce's Time-Life-Fortune publishing complex during 
WWII. One of the subscribers to my mailing list is a news producer at CNN. 
And so on. What Marx did when he was not filing journalistic pieces for the 
Tribune is what he is best remembered for.

>As for the point about the US and its junior partners, the very fact that
>they find (to this point) so little serious geopolitical opposition and
>flaunt the institutions of the interstate system and the global balance of
>power should certainly put one on notice that we no longer live in the
>same world as Lenin, Hobson or Hilferding.

It depends on what you mean by "the same world". Great Britain is no longer 
the colossus it once was. However, there is still imperialism which is the 
subject of Robert Biel's "The New Imperialism: Crisis and Contradictions in 
North/South Relations" (Zed Press, 2001). It covers ecology and the 
oppression of women in ways that would have not been possible in 1914. 
Marxism, in other words, does not stand still no matter what our critics 
believe.

>   Secondly, just because the new
>world order is no longer neatly parcellized into sovereign territorial
>units doesn't mean it is non-hierarchical.  In fact, Negri and Hardt make
>this argument quite explicitly.  To them, the US represents the first tier
>of Empire (with fundamentalisms and various NGOs filling out the lower
>tiers).

There is no textual support for this interpretation.

>  The belief that decenteredness is a good in itself (because now
>anything goes, and so resistance is futile) is never espoused in _Empire_,
>which in fact condemns the sorts of postmodernisms which make this
>argument.

Right. They espouse a different kind of postmodernism, more rooted in 
Guattari-Deleuze than Lyotard or Baudrillard. But it is junk nonetheless.

>Ah - the good old dumping on the 60's.  It's good to see that Marxists and
>conservatives are still in agreement on that one.

I prefer the 1930s myself.



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