I haven't bought _Empire_, but I skimmed through it in a local bookstore (& must confess that the skimming didn't motivate me to buy it). If we're going to discuss it, I'll get a copy from the OSU libraries. Based on the posts by my trusted comrade Pat Bond, as well as remarks by Max, Roger, & Brad, however, I'd have to be skeptical of the merits of the book. You haven't said anything that convinces me that Pat, etc. are off the mark.
I've been following Negri's works pretty closely, up until recently, & my judgment is that the man did the best work when he was closely associated with the actually existing Autonomist movements in Italy during the 70s. Back then, Autonomist criticism of Keynesian economics & social democratization of the CP was meaningful. We live in a different world today, in which the neoliberal hegemony has consigned social democracy to the dustbin of history. Negri's later attempts -- alone, with Guattari, with Hardt -- to grapple with the post-Soviet/post-Social Democratic conditions, in my view, are long on hyperbole & short on detailed examinations of objective contradictions. (My views on the subject are readily available in the November, 1999 section of the LBO-talk archive! Check the thread titled "Negri" at <http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/9911/index.html#1117> if anyone by any chance is interested.)
Negri's hyperbole probably is onto a new tendency (best exemplified by what has happened to Bosnia, Kosovo, & East Timor) developing in late imperialism (the era after the Autumn of the Patriarch), but if that's what he means by "Empire," I'd have to argue that there is nothing progressive about it. (Maybe I'll put this in my dissertation -- as if anyone cares!)
I just posted the following on Leninist-International, which I co-moderate with Macdonald Stainsby & Aysen Doyran (!!!):
+++++ Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 17:47:25 -0500 To: leninist-international at lists.wwpublish.com From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> Cc: pbond at WN.APC.ORG Subject: [L-I] Socialism, Regionalism, & Pan-Africanism (was Learning)
>My analysis is identical to Davidson's and I have made it repeatedly on the
>Marxism list. Africa's problems today stem from the fact that the colonial
>powers created states that disrespected traditional tribal jurisdictions.
>In the fight for independence, African elites accepted these borderlines
>uncritically. In the face of declining economic conditions, a process of
>Balkanization has made Africa unlivable. Davidson, who was assigned to work
>with Tito during WWII by the British army, argues that the implosion of
>various African states--including the Congo--is no different than what has
>taken place in Yugoslavia.
>
>Louis Proyect
Ideally, socialism in Africa should coincide with pan-Africanism of the revolutionary kind, and at the level of short- to medium-term goals, movements on the left should aspire to a regionalist program of the kind that Samir Amin, Pat Bond, etc. have advocated. That would go toward a solution of the Black Man's Burden that Basil Davidson has discussed. (In the case of Albania & Yugoslavia, calls for the Balkan Federation raised a couple of times in the early twentieth century, if implemented, might have prevented one seed of the present predicament from being sown.)
Here's an excerpt from an article by Pat Bond, with my comments interspersed here and there in it:
***** Patrick Bond, "Global Economic Crisis: A View from South Africa," _Journal of World-Systems Research_ 5.2 (Summer 1999): 413-455, at <http://csf.colorado.edu/jwsr/archive/vol5/vol5_number2/html/bond/index.html>
...From Africa's leading radical economist, Samir Amin, has come the theme of regional delinking:
The response to the challenge of our time imposes what I have suggested naming "delinking" ... Delinking is not synonymous with autarky, but rather with the subordination of external relations to the logic of internal development ... Delinking implies a "popular" content, anti-capitalist in the sense of being in conflict with the dominant capitalism, but permeated with the multiplicity of divergent interests.68
As unrealistic as this appears at first blush, the recent, present and forthcoming conditions of global economic crisis appear to both demand and supply the material grounds for a profound change in power relations. The ideological hegemony and financial stranglehold that neoliberalism and its sponsors have enjoyed are discredited and could fast disappear. Out of nowhere (East Asia!), after all, suddenly appeared system-threatening contradictions. [Yoshie: Now, the USA itself is about to contend with the economic fallout of neoliberalism that it has worked hard to make globally hegemonic, if California is a harbinger of things to come.]
And out of radical social and labour movements come, increasingly, demands that can only be met through greater national sovereignty and regional political-economic coherence. [Yoshie: How do we reconcile "greater national sovereignty" with "regional political-economic coherence"? A question that no one has answered yet, in theory and practice.] The global scale may one day appear as a likely site of struggle (for example, through the United Nations system which at least conceptually could be democratised, unlike the Bretton Woods institutions). [Yoshie: I see little hope of democratizing the U.N., unless movements on the left are powerful enough to abolish the Security Council & make the General Assembly the seat of real power, but let it slide for the moment.] But realistic "alternatives" are probably going to have to be fought for and won at national and regional scales.69 Such alternatives themselves need to be contextualised in power relations that are still to be fought for, Canadian labour radical Sam Ginden reminds us:
The real issue of "alternatives" isn't about alternative policies or about alternative governments, but about an alternative politics. Neither well-meaning policies nor sympathetic governments can fundamentally alter our lives unless they are part of a fundamental challenge to capital. That is, making alternatives possible requires a movement that is changing political culture (the assumptions we bring to how society should work), bringing more people into every-day struggles (collective engagement in shaping our lives), and deepening the understanding and organisational skills of activists along with their commitment to radical change (developing socialists).70
That commitment has already begun to take on international proportions through New Social Movements, Michael Lowy suggests:
Militant trade-unionists, left-wing socialists, de-Stalinized communists, undogmatic Trotskyists, unsectarian anarchists, are seeking out the paths to renewal of the proletarian internationalist tradition ... Concurrently, new internationalist feelings are becoming visible in social movements with a global perspective, like feminism and environmentalism, in antiracist movements, in liberation theology, in associations devoted to human rights and to solidarity with the third world ... It is from convergence between renewal of the socialist, anticapitalist and anti-imperialist tradition of proletarian internationalism -- ushered in by Marx in the Communist Manifesto -- and the universalist, humanist, libertarian, environmentalist, feminist, and democratic aspirations of the new social movements that can and will arise twenty-first-century internationalism.71
In a previous epoch -- one recent enough in the collective memory and still bursting with the pride of authentic struggle -- not more than a few thousand South African radical civil society activists took up a task of similar world-scale implications. In part, the struggle was to open up space for a developmental liberation (even if that space was quickly closed, and unnecessarily so, we have argued). A core component of the strategy was severing international elite relations with (and support for) apartheid, as Arrighi et al propose for the anti-neoliberal struggle. As impossible as the activists' anti-apartheid mission appeared during the darkest days, they won! Given the rapid shifts in power and the crisis of elite interests now being played out across the world, the multifaceted campaigns against Washington -- and against those in southern capitals who serve as its parrots -- still rank amongst the very highest priorities of South African progressives and their allies.
The era of an economic context in which Washington-oriented policy-makers went unchallenged is nearing an end, it appears. It remains for the world's various strains of progressive politics -- always in alliance with others concerned about meeting human needs and invoking ecological values -- to more forcefully show how the existing social and environmental programs of what we've termed New Social Movements can become (or contribute to) the foundation of an entirely different economic development strategy. Such efforts should receive the solidarity of progressives across the world-system--in activist and intellectual communities alike.
...68. Samir Amin, `Preface,' in A. Mahjoub (Ed), Adjustment or Delinking? The African Experience, London, Zed Press, 1990, pp.xii-xiii. See also his Delinking, London, Zed Press, 1990.
69. Alternative national- and regional-scale development policies have been established in several places, including the UN Economic Commission on Africa's AAF-SAP and the 1994 African National Congress Reconstruction and Development Programme (as well as other South African economic strategies offered by the Macroeconomic Research Group in 1993 and the Congress of South African Trade Unions in 1996). Such broad development policies should, naturally, follow directly from programmatic and project work being carried out by progressives in the field, because virtually all non-reformist reforms will run into strong opposition from economic policy-makers who are excessively committed to fiscal discipline, deregulating labour markets and promoting exports at all costs, and thus grassroots ownership of alternative strategies is vital to assuring they have popular durability under Washington Consensus duress.
70. Sam Ginden, `Rising from the Ashes: Labour in the Age of Global Capitalism,' Monthly Review, 49, 3, July-August 1997, p.156, cited in Moody, Workers in a Lean World, p.308.
71. Michael Lowy, `Globalization and Internationalism: How Up-to-date is the Communist Manifesto?,' Monthly Review, November 1998, pp.25-26. *****
The problem at present is that, on the ground in Africa (& elsewhere), there exists, as yet, no likely movement capable of exercising leadership & creating hegemony (in the Gramscian sense) necessary for the politico-economic program envisioned by Amin, Bond, etc. In the recent years, more people than before have become politicized & radicalized about the question of the neoliberal hegemony exercised through the Bretton Woods institutions and/or the so-called Washington consensus. Hence the hope that Pat Bond expresses for "New Social Movements." However, many activists involved in "New Social Movements" have yet to figure out the nature of today's imperialism, much less how to fight back against it (if leftists' responses to the recent expansion & intensification of imperial control over Iraq, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Congo, East Timor, etc. are any indications). In some cases, members of "New Social Movements" may be more part of problems than solutions.
There remain questions -- questions of political leadership & anti-imperialism in particular -- that should lead leftists (who are unsatisfied with the status quo & want to move forward) to a critical & knowing return to Lenin & Gramsci (= appreciation of the core insights of the two giants of what may be called the political side of the Marxist tradition, without being trapped in the unnecessary baggage created by various "Marxist-Leninist" parties).
Yoshie
P.S. I'm cc'ing this to Pat Bond, in case he has time to say something about it.
_______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list Leninist-International at lists.wwpublish.com To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international +++++
And this is Pat's reply:
+++++ From: "Patrick Bond" <pbond at wn.apc.org> To: leninist-international at lists.wwpublish.com,
Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 08:25:44 +0000 CC: pbond at wn.apc.org Priority: normal Subject: [L-I] Re: Socialism, Regionalism, & Pan-Africanism (was Learning)
> Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 17:47:25 -0500
> To: leninist-international at lists.wwpublish.com
> From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
> appeared system-threatening contradictions. [Yoshie: Now, the USA
> itself is about to contend with the economic fallout of neoliberalism
> that it has worked hard to make globally hegemonic, if California is
> a harbinger of things to come.]
Yes, but unfortunately with a strong right/populist orientation in national discourse which will be murder on the rest of the world. I've always had deep qualms about the kinds of tactical convergences of interest between left and right populists, and now we have some crunch years coming to see whether the movement that mobilised to promote Nader's candidacy can take up the range of conflict issues that the Bush regime will introduce.
> And out of radical social and labour movements come, increasingly,
> demands that can only be met through greater national sovereignty and
> regional political-economic coherence. [Yoshie: How do we reconcile
> "greater national sovereignty" with "regional political-economic
> coherence"? A question that no one has answered yet, in theory and
> practice.]
True, the better people writing on this (e.g., Amin and Bello) haven't got to the point of staking out concrete strategic approaches (in the current issue of Socialist Register, two SA comrades and I make some tentative arguments about regionalism from below). In the southern African case, the logical trajectory is to have Southern African people's movements unite to contest a) neoliberalism, b) Pretoria's subimperialism, and c) particular national regimes (like Mugabe's or Nujoma's). That process has begun nicely, at last August's Windhoek meeting of Southern African Development Community, where a superb collection of these movements issued a dramatic statement against neoliberal regionalism (http://www.aidc.org.za)
>The global scale may one day appear as a likely site of
> struggle (for example, through the United Nations system which at
> least conceptually could be democratised, unlike the Bretton Woods
> institutions). [Yoshie: I see little hope of democratizing the U.N.,
> unless movements on the left are powerful enough to abolish the
> Security Council & make the General Assembly the seat of real power,
> but let it slide for the moment.]
Yeah, I agree. That was a concession to the JWSR's editor (my former prof and a world-party builder) and Iris Young (whose new book aims in that direction) but you can sense my scepticism, right? Smash the embryonic world state, I say.
> The problem at present is that, on the ground in Africa (&
> elsewhere), there exists, as yet, no likely movement capable of
> exercising leadership & creating hegemony (in the Gramscian sense)
> necessary for the politico-economic program envisioned by Amin, Bond,
It's slow, but coming. I've got a short piece on ZNet (October 17 I think, at http://www.zmag.org ) and a forthcoming book ("Threatening Global Apartheid") trying to show how we are moving, in many Third World sites, from mere "IMF Riots" as resistance, to mass-democratic activism. It's happening all over the world, with an intensity and magnitude that far outweighs Seattle/DC/Prague.
> etc. In the recent years, more people than before have become
> politicized & radicalized about the question of the neoliberal
> hegemony exercised through the Bretton Woods institutions and/or the
> so-called Washington consensus. Hence the hope that Pat Bond
> expresses for "New Social Movements." However, many activists
Ok, I'm not calling them "New Social Movements" anymore. Too many semantic problems. What do you suggest? I'm favourable to "Global Justice Movements" but help me out: have we got sufficient norms, values, strategies/tactics and analyses to call what's going on a "movement"?
> involved in "New Social Movements" have yet to figure out the nature
> of today's imperialism, much less how to fight back against it (if
> leftists' responses to the recent expansion & intensification of
> imperial control over Iraq, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Congo, East Timor,
> etc. are any indications). In some cases, members of "New Social
> Movements" may be more part of problems than solutions.
Sure, as always.
> There remain questions -- questions of political leadership &
> anti-imperialism in particular -- that should lead leftists (who are
> unsatisfied with the status quo & want to move forward) to a critical
> & knowing return to Lenin & Gramsci (= appreciation of the core
> insights of the two giants of what may be called the political side
> of the Marxist tradition, without being trapped in the unnecessary
> baggage created by various "Marxist-Leninist" parties).
Agreed! So, what's your formula for doing this?
>
> Yoshie
>
> P.S. I'm cc'ing this to Pat Bond, in case he has time to say
> something about it.
(Flattered for the attention, but you do realise, Yoshie, that I'm merely a fast-typing mouthpiece for lots of much more organic Southern Africa leftist work going on around here... and as an expat--soon to be an SA citizen--I should be much more discrete, really. But you can pass this on if it adds anything.)
Patrick Bond (pbond at wn.apc.org) home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa phone: (2711) 614-8088 work: University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development Management PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa work email: bond.p at pdm.wits.ac.za work phone: (2711) 717-3917 work fax: (2711) 484-2729 cellphone: (27) 83-633-5548 * Municipal Services Project website -- http://www.queensu.ca/msp * to order new book: Cities of Gold, Townships of Coal -- http://store.yahoo.com/africanworld/865436126.html
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I'd rather see folks discuss Pat's work than Negri's....
Yoshie