Empire: Hardt responds

[Rob Schaap]

Yeah, but ya gotta balance this insight with the avoidance of hard
determinism - (unless you're a hard determinist, natch).  The
superstructure can preponderate at times, as Freddie told Bloch in 1890,
and I'll not wear any defeatist nonsense that we have to let the whole
edifice have its way across the board while we wait for Carrol to bring us
the revolution.  We can mess with stuff - including capital's base
directive of blind accumulation - we do it all the time, just not always
consciously.

Cheers,
Rob.

>*****   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