--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> Charles J. wrote:
>
> >Most of what is changed is simply Negri rejecting
> his earlier
> >doctrinaire communism.
He rejected that at the latest when Potere Operaio was dissolved in favor of "Autonomia". At that time and even before Negri rejected "vanguardism"...So it's not like Negri rejected doctrinaire communism for the first time in Empire...read "Marx After Marx", "Insurgencies", "Labor of Dionysus" and other previous works.
If you've been following
> post-modern Marxism
> >at all--like Negri without co-author, Deleuze and
> Guattari or
> >Baudrilllard--you'll find little of anything new or
> important in
> >Empire.
That's like saying, Marx didnt say anything of significance...he just borrowed from Feuerbach, Hegel and David Ricardo. You are right, however, to point out how he is indebted to these authors (though not so much Baudrillard). You forgot to mention Foucault though.
That Empire has been successfully marketed
> to the book of
> >the month club crowd, however, IS SIGNIFICANT.
>
This is what really has the Leninist crowd pissed off...the fact that the book has had success. They like to speculate as to how that could happen...Certainly it is a bourgeois attempt to beat back the overwhelming sucess of Leninists.
a
> celebration of
> Americanism that, unlike Thomas Friedman's,
It may celebrate in some places the power of the American working class. It may talk about how the American form of rule accomodates Empire best, but it does not celebrate the terror wrought by American capitalism.
refuses
> to recognize the
> U.S. government's political and military hegemony
> that makes the
> Empire what it is.
It says that America enjoys a prestigious position within Empire. It also talks about the three forms of force used: the bomb, money, and communication.
> Thus _Empire_
> does disservice to leftists, in that it avoids the
> reality of
> America's imperial powers from which such liberal
> and conservative
> writers for The Empire as Thomas Friedman, Paul
> Johnson, William
> Pfaff, Martin Wolf, etc. do not shy away.
> --
Again, I have to ask if you really read this book Yoshie. As I have said and it is made clear throughout the book that Negri is describing Empire; he is not against the breakdown of nationalism per se, but wants to see it replaced by global communism. That's the bit that the reviewer from Time Magazine and YOU seem to not get.
Now, the question of what is new in Negri and his indebtedness to Guattari, Deleuze and others is a question worth considering. However, Yoshie, your positions are based on a distortion...you need to either go back and read Negri and Hardt closely or SHUT UP, because you dont know what the hell you are talking about.
Thomas
===== "The tradition of all the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living"
-Karl Marx
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