Re: Fwd: Italy's postmodern politics

Toni Negri:
>      This new programme, for a more advanced stage of the
>      communist revolution, is now firmly lodged in the
>      political awareness of substantial numbers of citizens
>      and militants of the new left. It is a programme for
>      "absolute democracy" as Spinoza would have said, and as
>      Marx would have wished: a republic based on the broadest
>      possible cooperation between citizens, and on the
>      development of common goods.

This is sheer gibberish. There can be no such thing as "absolute 
democracy". With capitalist society divided between two major classes, you 
can only have a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or of the workers. 
Furthermore, instead of glittering generalities about a republic based on 
"possible cooperation between systems", we need to examine existing 
socialisms. Hardt and Negri are essentially "dreamers of the absolute". In 
distinction, Marx said in the German Ideology:

"What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has 
developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges 
from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, 
morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old 
society from whose womb it emerges."

Hardt-Negri's work is filled with contempt for the miserable peons who 
tried against impossible odds in the 20th century to make a better life for 
themselves and their children, the so called "poison pill" of national 
liberation. I only wish that these two mandarins would know what it felt 
like to have an infant child die of diarrhea or to go hungry themselves. 
Then they wouldn't preach pie-in-the-sky to everybody who can afford a 
Harvard University hard-cover book.



Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org