Empire: Hardt responds

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>  > [Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 13:19:10 -0500 (EST)
>>  From: Michael Hardt <hardt at duke.edu>
>>
>>  I think it is important to view Empire or globalization as multifaceted
>>  phenomena, which comprise a variety of processes and elements.  My
>>  position is that Empire is a negative development (it brings new, more
>>  intense and more brutal forms of exploitation and domination, greater gap
>>  between rich and poor and within national space, terrifying oppression
>>  through military means and starvation, etc), but it is also simultaneously
>>  a positive development in that it creates greater potential for
>>  liberation.
>
>A month or so from now when I have my
>right wrist back I may want to comment
>more concretely on this thread. But for now
>I would point out that this banal division of
>an entity into good and bad aspects was at
>the core of the cretinism that provoked
>_Poverty of Philosophy_.It can initiate entertaining
>mind games but has zilch relevance to
>changing the world.
>
>Carrol

I hope we'll hear from you soon, Carrol.  In the meantime, allow me 
to point to the following passage of relevance on the problem of 
dividing "an entity into good and bad aspects" from the article 
Jonathan Lassen posted here in a different thread:

*****   Finally, before offering our political critique of the 
left-liberal consensus, it is useful to note the close parallels 
between our methodological critique and Rosa Luxemburg's critique of 
Bernstein's more original form of revisionism.  Luxemburg notes, for 
example, how Bernstein takes certain (positive or negative) aspects 
of capitalism out of their class-exploitative, hence contradictory, 
structural context: Bernstein's theory does not seize these 
manifestations of contemporary economic life as they appear in their 
organic relationship with the whole of capitalist development, with 
the complete economic mechanism of capitalism.  His theory pulls 
these details out of their living economic context.  It treats them 
as the disjecta membra (separate parts) of a lifeless machine. 
(Luxemburg, 1970: 61)  As a result, says Luxemburg, Bernstein's 
revisionism has a close  affinity with the viewpoint of `the isolated 
capitalist [who] sees each organic part of the whole of our economy 
as an independent entity . . . as they act upon him, the single 
capitalist'.  For, insofar as revisionism limits its analysis to an 
uncritical acceptance of `the economic facts . . . just as they 
appear when refracted by the laws of competition,' then `revisionism 
is nothing else than a theoretic generalization made from the angle 
of the isolated capitalist'.  Luxemburg then argues that such an 
a-historical, non-holistic  perspective necessarily `ends in utopia' 
because it is incapable of seeing how `the contradictions of 
capitalism mature'; indeed, like the isolated capitalist, revisionism 
`wants to lessen, to attenuate, the capitalist contradictions' (1970: 
60-3).15  The similarity between Luxemburg's classical critique of 
revisionism and our critique of the left-liberal consensus on Japan 
becomes even clearer when we consider the political implications of 
the latter.  As we shall see, because this consensus is based on an 
understanding of capitalism that also `pulls . . . details out of 
their living context,' views the economy `from the angle of the 
isolated capitalist,' and `is guided by the . . . possibility of the 
attenuation of the contradictions of capitalism,' it must also, like 
Bernstein's revisionism, `end in utopia'.   (Paul Burkett and Martin 
Hart-Landsberg, "The Use and Abuse of Japan as a Progressive Model," 
_The Socialist Register_ 1996, at 
<http://www.yorku.ca/socreg/burkett-landsberg96.txt>)   *****

Yoshie