> Who's talking about reforming Empire? The idea is to take the social
> networks that Empire has produced and move beyond them - throw off
> the constraints of capital and liberate the multitude.
>
>Seth Ackerman wrote:
>But what does that have to do with *economic* linkages? When Thai farmers
>send commodities to a Mexican maquiladora to be exported to New Jersey, is
>that a "social network"? Or is it just an expoitative economic network that
>needs to be unraveled.
My (still partial) understanding is that 'economic' linkages are identical with the immanence (immanent development) of social labor under capitalism. These are not identical with the 'social networks that Empire has produced', which instead are connected (problematically for me, for sure) with the concept of 'constituent power' - the representational, republican institutions (social networks) - which in its "left oppositional" form assumes the form of "radical republicanism", which at the limit assume the form of direct democracy, i.e., self-organized worker's councils in direct communication with one another. Only at this point do we see the identity of social labor with "social networks".
A contemporary example would be 1) superexploited sweatshop workers manufacture articles for consumption by (exploited) workers in an imperialist country. This 'economic linkage' is brought into being by the (historically) preexisting 'social networks' of capitalist enterprise; 2) in turn, this brings into being a potentially oppositional 'social network' of antisweatshop activists, trade unionists, etc., who _are_ the realization of 'constituent power'. "Potential" (I inject this here) varies with the degree of organizational independence from preexisting capitalist networks, and the validity of this representation of the workers involved; 3) the oppositional social networks go to Seattle to disrupt the WTO, prevent it from functioning, intervene in the elections to disrupt their functioning (although they must 'try to win', but this is beside the point), and so forth.
As others have noted here on this list, this is actually an old question - already over 100 years old in the modern socialist movement - and Negri/Hardt have done little more (so far as I can see, but I'm still looking) than re-project this question, in a highly imaginative manner, onto the present global scene.
What really needs to be drilled into is the dialectic of representative ('constituent') and direct power, whose negative result is ' bureaucracy ', anti-democratic representation. I've yet to see adequate address from N&H on this. It is really the same old question shorn of it "classical marxist" markers.
And, well, pardon my naivete, but nobody corrected me on this: Negri, Hardt and associates have considerably addressed "State", but not in the monolithic form of "Empire". The are presently contained, in English, in the "Theory out of Bounds" series: "Labor of Dionysus: Critique of the State Form" and "Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State". I've not read them - anybody have?
>CB: Agree with Seth. It is the technical networks that are the
>infrastructure for socialism and communism. The social networks or
>relationships between people in production are that which have to change.
Hmm, where does the technical leave off and the social begin? Presumably at the point of revolution, where in the post-capitalist society we might find we have inherited a whole host of "technical problems", i.e., social problems. For ex: is commuting to work a technical network or a social network?
-Brad Mayer Oakland, CA