--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> In short, if you accept Hardt & Negri's analysis,
> why resist the
> expansion of Empire? Is it not reactionary to
> resist it tout court?
Yoshie,
It is true that I flame certain people on this list, but I dont want to do that to you here. However, I really want to know...have you read the book or are your comments based upon what you have heard of the book? The Time magazine reviewer read the book as an apology for globalization...is that where you are getting your information from?
Negri's book describes the "world order" as he sees it. He calls it "Empire". Marx also depicted the world in which he found himself. Now, we might question either of these two authors depictions, but what I think they were trying to describe was the world as it is, not as they would dream it or as they would create it. They have another thing in common...they both describe the forces within that world that are capable of creating something new.
Negri, in the epoch of global capitalism, does doubt that national liberation can be of any use as protection against global capital. Now you interpret that to mean that he is some kind of fatalist...that we should just let global capitalism continue on its course. That is wrong.
Negri states very clearly in MANY places both in Empire and in his works before Empire the importance of subjectivity....that is the importance of humans to intervene and destroy capitalism...he refutes any positivist notion that we should just wait and let things happen on their own.
He thinks that with the real subsumption of all forces in the global network, as well as the new modes of labor, are creating a situation conducive to revolution.
Now why he thinks this requires a thorough study of the book and I wont try to defend it here. However, my point is that you are wrong to think that Negri is some kind of Kautsky (the comparison that most Marxist-Leninists like to make)...Negri does not want to see some kind of global planned capitalism, he wants the world's popular forces, which are also forged into unity by global capitalism, to create a global opposition to global capitalism.
Agree with that or not, but please do not try and make Negri into an apologist for global capitalism....He is not.
Thomas
===== "The tradition of all the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living"
-Karl Marx
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