A Modest Proposal for The Empire

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Dec 24 14:10:43 PST 2001


Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
>
>
> Yoshie, have you lost your mind? You're starting to sound like
> Brad. You remember Brad western-civilization-owes-it-all-to-capitalism
> de Long. What's wrong with that picture?
>

Tsk tsk Chuck. Remember, in the part you quoted, Yoshie said (emphasis added) "IF you accept Hardt & Negri's analysis." The case being argued might be that (whatever their intentions) Negri & Hardt _add up to_ Brad in practice: that they present an all-destroying empire and offer no way to oppose it. Hence we are thrown back on the (seemingly) polar opposites of hoping for the best (from Empire itself: it is self-dissolving) or in the individualist moral response of throwing ourselves upon the gears of the machine -- which, of course, is what the perpetrators of 911 did. Actually, Doug himself, in his original account of Negri & Hardt, made _the_ damning criticism: their utter vagueness in suggesting the practical import of their maunderings. And Doug's criticism is utterly unanswerable (and no one has attempted to answer it).

Carrol



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list