By "Empire" do Negri & Hardt _really_ mean "technology and internationalization"? (The questions remain: What "technology"? "Internationalization" of what?) Then, why don't they go ahead & write "technology and internationalization," instead of using the term "Empire"?
At 5:07 PM -0800 1/22/01, Brad Mayer wrote:
>>"Despite recognizing all this, we insist on asserting that the
>>construction of Empire is a step forward in order to do away with any
>>nostalgia for the power structures that preceded it and refuse any
>>political strategy that involves returning to that old arrangement,
>>such as trying to resurrect the nation-state to protect against
>>global capital. We claim that Empire is better in the same way that
>>Marx insists that capitalism is better than the forms of society and
>>modes of production that came before it. Marx's view is grounded on a
>>healthy and lucid disgust for the parochial and rigid hierarchies
>>that preceded capitalist society as well as on a recognition that the
>>potential for liberation is increased in the new situation"
>>- Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, p. 43
>
>Interesting this should come up in parallel with the Kosovo (Kacek
>massacre) tread. Coincidence? I'm sure C. Burford and other
>imperialists would agree with Negri here....
>
>...it can be argued that imperialism - including the present-day
>Washington "Empire" - is necessarily, always and everywhere the most
>retrograde aspect of the whole process of "globalization" (putting
>aside for the sake of argument the disputed meaning of this term),
>because what (if anything) is possibly historically progressive
>about this process is to be found in its economic, not political,
>aspect.
>
>...Under "Empire" the nation-state - in the shape of particular
>dominant nation-states, generally grows stronger, not weaker....
>
>This conception of "Empire", like its economic counterpart
>"neoliberalism", is nothing but a fashionable intellectual illusion.
>If we strip away the Althusserian/poststructuralist encumbrances
>(lightly sprinkled with a bit of postmodern spicing here and there),
>all we have is the statement - unintended by the authors - that the
>United States is the most historically progressive nation-state in
>the world today, simply because it is most capable of knocking down
>the barriers presented by other, weaker, nation-states. This
>"despite recognizing" various contradictions of latter-day "Empire".
It seems to me that Brad Mayer's is a much more plausible interpretation of _Empire_.
Yoshie