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Title: Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri ISBN: 0-674-00671-2 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: August, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.08 (63 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Will the Empire ever strike out?
Comment: Classical MArxist theory is being beset from both sides. Neo-Liberal texts like _the End of History_ argue that we've tried communism and it failed. Postmodernists, beginning with Lyotard, has claimed that grand narratives, like those that underlie Marxism, have been discredited. Hardt & Negri's _Empire_ is an attempt to recover Marxism and adapt it to the postmodern condition.
Situated between two formative events, the Gulf War and the Kosovo intervention, the concept of "Empire" is used to explain how this adaptation can work. Although Lenin's classical text _Imperialis_ explains well how nation-states used the mantras of capitalism to justify expansion and domination, with the decentering of state power Lenin's explanation seems less likely. Hardt & Negri show that the transnationalization of capitalism and its attendant logics allows the death of the nation-state while preserving the logics of imperialism. In sum, there is now imperialism without an imperialist. Empire, the logic that undergirded traditional imperialism has become pre- and self-justifying.
Although Hardt & Negri make a compelling case that Empire requires a new way of conceptualizing capitalist exploitation, they provide too little in the way of resistant strategies. We are told that new informatics regimes and subjectivites allow space for resistance. Rather than being workers in a capitalist nation-state, we are worker bees (drones) that are led by a queen bee. Yet, when we reach the end of the book, there is no way for the drones to overcome or resist the queen bee's dictates.
It is almost as if the world of _Ender's Game_ has been imposed on planet earth, only with the Buggers winning this time. The proper goals of Marxist theory in the postmodern condition is to help the worker resist, as the metanarrative of classical MArxism has been discredited.
This book, while properly descriptive and normative, lacks the prescriptive action that this analysis needs to become complete. Perhaps the prescriptive action, though, is what landed Negri in prison and requires his release before we can find out what it was.
Rating: 3
Summary: Essential if ultimately disappointing
Comment: Perhaps it's a bit late to weigh in on Empire, but so many of the posted reviews strike me as so silly that I couldn't resist: most simply denounce or praise the authors for being "Marxist" or complain about the obscurantist writing. As for the first approach: who cares one way or another? Obviously Hardt and Negri aren't just repeating what Marx said, and why should they? (On the other hand, it's ridiculous to pretend that someone could analyze contemporary capitalism without referring to Marx.) Anyway, there is no general, systematic "framework" called Marxism, that you could accept or reject wholesale. Marx himself wasn't a Marxist, as everyone knows!
As for the writing, I've been surprised by how frequently people attack its academicism: anyone familiar with Negri's previous work can tell that he's dumbed down the arguments a fair amount, which has sometimes deprived them of some of their subtlety and rigor. It's a book of political philosophy, not the latest pot-boiler from your average journalist. I don't think it's elitist to ask the general public to grapple with a difficult work--I'm sure most are quite capable of it!
As for Empire itself: I think Negri has made a major misstep. The basic argument is simple (another reason I don't see its intellectualism--everyone has at least gotten the major point). Negri has made himself look pretty foolish coming out with a book in 2000 claiming that traditional imperialism is dead (the subsequent policies of George II's administration have forced Hardt and Negri to more or less admit they got it wrong in recent interviews). He seems to have gotten taken in by the liberal/social-democratic rhetoric of the 90s, which envisioned a super-state providing global capitalism with an international law. This was never anything but a reformist utopia, which projected a welfare-state compromise at the global level--after 20 years of Reagan-Thatcherism and neoliberalism at the national level!
Theoretically, then, Negri is just expanding on his old thesis of "real subsumption" (yes, the term is Marx's but Negri has elabrated a quite original interpretation), sprucing it up with a new theory of sovereignty. The claim--surrounded by so many qualifications and caveats that Hardt and Negri clearly don't really buy the argument themselves and are hedging their bets--is that the nation-state, and hence imperialism in its old sense are rapidly declining, being replaced by an imperial sovereignty that is conceptually foggy and simply doesn't reflect empirical historical tendencies. The "nation-state" as an abstraction is as strong as ever--it's everywhere! Some actually existing nation-states are much stronger than others, however--in other words, the U.S., Western Europe, Japan, perhaps China and Russia, are still potentially (and in the case of the U.S. actually) imperialist powers. They will never coordinate themselves into a regulated global order, and even if they did, the global South would never accept such an order.
Negri used to argue back in the 80s that the form of sovereignty most appropriate to the era of real subsumption was the nuclear state, not some international social democracy. It seems to me he should have stuck with this line--if anything it's more true than ever today. The basic political unit is still the state, and there isn't a state out there that doesn't ardently desire some nukes! (By the way, as far as I can tell Hardt's main contribution to Empire is to bring in discussions of the "postmodernism" and "post-colonial" theory that is so popular in certain academic circles. An almost total waste of time.)
Overall, Empire is still fascinating in its suggestiveness and its grand syntheses. Even if you disagree with the argument, it is absorbing and thought-provoking reading.
Rating: 2
Summary: * So Many Weak Spots, It Undermines It's Premise *
Comment: The super new "insight" this book supposedly brings to the discussion of globalization - that there are a network of aligned capitalist interests called "EMPIRE" - is completely obscured by bad writing, a poor understanding of global economics, and a failure to analyze hard factual trends. The appeal is purely emotional, playing on readers who are threatened by the warp-speed changes that are affecting life in the 21st century.
What is the real threat of EMPIRE anyway? The authors never really address thi point. By any measurement, life on this mortal coil is infinitely better than when Marx or Lenin wrote, for more people than ever before. Life expectancy is up 100% in the last 75 years, literacy rates have more than doubled, and more people live in more democracies than ever before. These trends have accelerated in the last 20 years - the years in which the authors claim that EMPIRE came to be. Take a look at Marber's book Money Changes Everything for some real facts that bury the purported evils of EMPIRE. If the consequences of EMPIRE are better living standards globally for billions, I think most readers (and workers of the world) would vote for EMPIRE over the decentralized revolution for which our naive communist writers call.
This is a shame. Because the great observation here is that EMPIRE transcends national borders; yes, this is a very valid point and more academics should delve into the withering of sovereignty. But the authors'conclusion - that EMPIRE is inherently bad - is such a miscue. What planet do they live on?
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Title: Debating Empire (New Left Review Debates) by Gopal Balakrishnan, Stanley Aronowitz, Giovanni Arrighi ISBN: 1859844529 Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: 04 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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Title: Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz ISBN: 0393324397 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian (Stanford, Calif.).) by Giorgio Agamben, Daniel Heller-Roazen ISBN: 0804732183 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr Pub. Date: June, 1998 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Empire's New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri by Paul A. Passavant, Jodi Dean ISBN: 0415935555 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: November, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson ISBN: 0860915468 Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: July, 1991 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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