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Re: empire, law and important boundaries and dates by Louis Proyect 15 March 2002 19:09 UTC |
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At 10:33 AM 3/15/2002 -0800, Fernando Gomez wrote: > Two: Hardt/Negri try to work within Wallerstein's panoramic work. They try >to move it further. Bring it to another level. Push the envelope. Hardt/Negri might write about the same planet as Wallerstein does, but they are coming at it from a different angle. Wallerstein is a critic of capitalism, while Hardt/Negri are apologists for the capitalist system using autonomist Marxist rhetoric. Interestingly enough, they recommend (albeit in dodgy postmodernist prose) the same flawed early writings on India by Marx that both A.G. Frank and Edward Said see as troubled legacies of Marxism. This, of course, is unfair to Marx since late in life, Marx saw nothing good coming out of the English role in India, etc. Here's an excerpt from a much longer piece on "Empire" that I posted here: Key to their stratagem is a reliance on the Karl Marx India articles that appeared in the New York Tribune in 1853. Putting this defense of British colonialism into the foreground helps shroud their arguments in Marxist orthodoxy. In effect, the Karl Marx of the Tribune articles becomes a kind of St. John the Baptist to their messianic arrival: "In the nineteenth century Karl Marx...recognized the utopian potential of the ever-increasing processes of global interaction and communication." (Empire, p. 118) In contrast to the bioregionalist pleas of anti-globalization activist Vandana Shiva, perhaps the best thing that could have happen to India is deeper penetration by the WTO, based on this citation from Marx that appears in "Empire": "Sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness, we must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, and they restrained the human mind, within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath the traditional rules depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies." It is indeed unfortunate that Hardt and Negri are content to rest on this version of Marx even though they have to admit that he "was limited by his scant knowledge of India's past and present." Not to worry, since "his lack of information...is not the point." (Empire, p. 120) In other words, this Marx of scanty knowledge fits perfectly into the schema being constructed in "Empire" since it too is generally characterized by a lack of concrete economic and historical data. As Aijaz Ahmad points out (In Theory, pp 221-242), Marx had exhibited very little interest in India prior to 1853, when the first of the Tribune articles were written. It was the presentation of the East India Company's application for charter renewal to Parliament that gave him the idea of writing about India at all. To prepare for the articles, he read the Parliamentary records and Bernier's "Travels". (Bernier was a 17th century writer and medicine man.) So it is fair to say that Marx's views on India were shaped by the contemporary prejudices. More to the point is that Marx had not even drafted the Grundrisse at this point and Capital was years away. On July 22nd, Marx wrote a second article that contains sentiments that Hardt and Negri choose to ignore, even though it is embedded in a defense of British colonialism. In this article, Marx is much less interested in the benefits of "global interaction and communication" than he is in the prospects of kicking the British out: "The Indian will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the new ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether." So unless there is social revolution, the English presence in India brings no particular advantage. More to the point, it will bring tremendous suffering. Furthermore, there is evidence that Marx was becoming much more aware of how the imperialist system operated late in life. In a letter to the Russian populist Danielson in 1881, he wrote: "In India serious complications, if not a general outbreak, are in store for the British government. What the British take from them annually in the form of rent, dividends for railways useless for the Hindoos, pensions for the military and civil servicemen, for Afghanistan and other wars, etc. etc., -- what they take from them without any equivalent and quite apart from what they appropriate to themselves annually within India, -- speaking only of the commodities that Indians have to gratuitously and annually send over to England -- it amounts to more than the total sum of the income of the 60 million of agricultural and industrial laborers of India. This is a bleeding process with a vengeance." A bleeding process with a vengeance? This obviously does not square with the version of colonialism found in "Empire". Within a few years, the Second International would become embroiled in a controversy that pitted Eduard Bernstein against the revolutionary wing of the movement, including British Marxist Belford Bax and Rosa Luxemburg. Using arguments similar to Hardt and Negri's, Bernstein said that colonialism was basically a good thing since it would hasten the process of drawing savages into capitalist civilization, a necessary first step to building communism. In a January 5, 1898 article titled "The Struggle of Social Democracy and the Social Revolution," Bernstein makes the case for colonial rule over Morocco. Drawing from English socialist Cunningham Graham's travel writings, Bernstein states there is absolutely nothing admirable about Morocco. In such countries where feudalism is mixed with slavery, a firm hand is necessary to drag the brutes into the civilized world: "There is a great deal of sound evidence to support the view that, in the present state of public opinion in Europe, the subjection of natives to the authority of European administration does not always entail a worsening of their condition, but often means the opposite. However much violence, fraud, and other unworthy actions accompanied the spread of European rule in earlier centuries, as they often still do today, the other side of the picture is that, under direct European rule, savages are *without exception better off* than they were before... "Am I, because I acknowledge all this, an 'adulator' of the present? If so, let me refer Bax to The Communist Manifesto, which opens with an 'adulation' of the bourgeoisie which no hired hack of the latter could have written more impressively. However, in the fifty years since the Manifesto was written the world has advanced rather than regressed; and the revolutions which have been accomplished in public life since then, especially the rise of modern democracy, have not been without influence on the doctrine of social obligation." (Marxism and Social Democracy, p. 153-154) It is of course no accident that arguments found in Bernstein are now making a re-appearance in "Empire" a little bit over a century later. We have been going through a fifty-year economic expansion in the imperialist world that tends to cast a shadow over the project of proletarian revolution. From a class perspective, it is not too difficult to understand why the new challenge to Marxism--in the name of Marxism--emerges out of the academy just as it arose out of the top rungs of the party bureaucracy in the 1880s. From a relatively privileged social position in the bowels of the most privileged nations on earth, it is easy to succumb to defeatist moods. In a few years, the complacency of the revisionist wing of the Social Democracy was shattered by the greatest blood-letting in human history, as the nations of Europe demonstrated that capitalism produced nothing like "global interaction and communication". The pressures of bourgeois nationalism caused socialist parliamentarians to vote for war credits. In reaction to this kind of social patriotism, Lenin and the Zimmerwaldists fought for proletarian internationalism and withdrawal from the war. In their most signal victory, the Leninist wing of the socialist movement led working people and peasants to victory in Russia in 1917. Key to this victory was an understanding that oppressed nationalities had the right to self-determination, even if this meant separation from the new Soviet state. In one of the most important advances in Marxist thought, Lenin came to the understanding that peoples such as the Crimean Tatars, the Irish, the Chinese, the Indians, etc. deserved freedom even if they were being led by bourgeois elements. In the epoch of imperialism, such struggles had a revolutionary dynamic that Marxists should push to the full conclusion. Hardt and Negri dispense with this tradition altogether. They take sides with Rosa Luxemburg who "argued vehemently (and futilely) against nationalism in the debates in the Third International in the years before the First World War." (BEFORE the First World War? It is a sign of Hardt and Negri's unfamiliarity with this terrain that they allude to debates in the Third International years before it came into existence. The Third International was formed in the aftermath of the Bolshevik victory in 1917, which itself was sparked by WWI among other factors.) In their eyes, Luxemburg's "most powerful argument...was that nation means dictatorship and is thus profoundly incompatible with any attempt at democratic organization." While Rosa Luxemburg was one of the greatest revolutionary thinkers and activists of the twentieth century, their can be little doubt that her views on such matters were colored by her experience in the Polish revolutionary movement. Her differences with Lenin were part of a debate taking place prior to WWI that had to do with relatively localized concerns over whether assimilation of Polish workers into the Russian economy would hasten the prospects of proletarian revolution. Her untimely death at the hands of the German state in 1919 prevented her from seeing the revolutionary dynamic of the colonial revolution. That being said, her article on the Russian revolution was written in prison where access to information was severely limited. It is, however, in this article where some of her most extreme anti-nationalist feelings are vented. She writes: "Lenin and his comrades clearly calculated that there was no surer method of binding the many foreign [sic] peoples within the Russian Empire to the cause of the revolution, to the cause of the socialist proletariat, than that of offering them, in the name of the revolution and socialism, the most extreme and unlimited freedom to determine their own fate." (Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p. 379-380) Somebody--I can't recall who--once said that there is "Their Rosa Luxemburg and ours." If this is the Rosa Luxemburg that counts with Hardt and Negri, they are welcome to her. Not only would Hardt and Negri have been opposed to struggles for formal independence from colonialism, they are just as unrelenting in their opposition to any struggle against neocolonialism that would rely on defensive measures by the nation-state of the oppressed group. For example, while Cuba achieved formal independence after the Spanish-American war, the July 26th movement was organized around many of the nationalist themes found in José Marti's writings. Even if the Cuban flag flew over Havana in the late 1950s, the guerrilla movement quite rightly saw sovereignty as resting in the American embassy. Not only would Hardt and Negri would have been opposed to any movement that sought to achieve formal independence like the Portuguese colonies in Africa in the 1970s and 80s, they would have also condemned efforts to achieve genuine economic independence in Sandinista Nicaragua in the same period. As anti-nationalist purists, the only political entity worth struggling to take over is that which exists on a global basis even though the forces of repression exist within the borders of the nation-state. When Somoza's National Guard was throwing radical youth out of helicopters during the civil war, Hardt and Negri would have urged the FSLN to shun overthrowing the US-backed butchers and creating a new state based on the armed peasantry and working class. Their arguments, although formulated in over-inflated jargon, boil down to the sentiments found in the Who song "Won't Get Fooled Again." They write: "The perils of national liberation are even clear when viewed externally, in terms of the world economic system in which the 'liberated' nation finds itself. Indeed, the equation nationalism equals political and economic modernization, which has been heralded by leaders of numerous anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles from Gandhi and Ho Chi Minh to Nelson Mandela, really ends up being a perverse trick...The very concept of a liberatory national sovereignty is ambiguous if not completely contradictory. While this nationalism seeks to liberate the multitude from foreign domination, it erects domestic structures of domination that are equally severe." (Empire, p. 132-133) http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/modernism/hardt_negri.htm Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
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