Empire and Ghandi

It is not only Africa that Hardt and Negri show only the most passing interest 
in.  The following quote is also telling:

"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) 

It says a lot that Ghandi is lumped in among the 'heralds' of 'nationalism 
equals political and economic modernization'.  This is something Ghandi 
actually wrote:

"I do not believe that multiplication of wants and machinery contrived to 
supply them is taking the world a single step nearer its goal...  I 
wholeheartedly detest this mad desire to destroy distance and time to increase 
animal appetites and go to the ends of the earth in search of their 
satisfaction.  If modern civilization stands for all this, and I have 
understood it to do so, I call it Satanic."

Apparently the prospect that some non-European leaders may have sought national 
liberation to be free from modernity, rather than to ape it, is unimaginable in 
the world of 'Empire'.

Steven Sherman

<Yet
when Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri consider the continent at all, it is
hoist by some petards of postmodernity and its hypercrises. Empire pours
needed (although dialectical) scorn on those believing in the oxymoron of
national liberation but then wishes its contemporary problems away. It is
as if Africa and the rest of the "third world" had joined with the
borderless multitude in advanced capitalist corners of the world.

One has only to come down to earth to remember that the millions of African
refugees constitute a qualitatively different realm of existence than that
lived by those rendered borderless by jets and cyberspace. The latter's
subjectivities are formed in the merging of superstructure and structure
occurring when communications become a means of production, and their
differences are sublimated by Internet expertise. Yet in Africa, we see the
deep, deep crises of modernity deferred-but now, perhaps, accelerated, thus
more disruptive than ever in our post-cold war era. Borderlessness in
Africa is due to poverty, war, and famine and is subject to the mentalities
of "tradition" (often invented, to be sure, but nevertheless counter to a
strategy of Gramsci's "good sense") rather than a combination of supercool
calculation and cyborgian connectivity. Does that mean that Africa (as
always, we often end up thinking in spite of ourselves) is dependent on
what the hyperadvanced multitude in the West decides for it? Is the
discourse articulated in Empire yet another version, along with the various
strands of development and underdevelopment theory over which we have pored
in the past, yet another strand of academic "trickle-down"?>