Well, Eudora crashed and lost my email (because at my workplace we can't use the superior competitors' product), so instead of trying to recall what I was writing, suffice to say:
1) I zeroed in on a vulnerable target for effect, putting forward what I take to be the original general Marxist view of the relation of State to society (and Empire is a form of State in the end), a view that has tended to get lost in the intervening decades;
2) There are some useful nuggets to salvaged from the mess, such as the image of the Washington Empire as "network power", which neatly highlights the feature that sets it off from its predecessors such as the British;
3) H&N take this feature, which I see as dominant, and make it _transcendent_ over and above all nation-states. This is an error: the network is historically rooted in and dependent on one nation-state: the USA. Without it, no Empire. The converse is true: without Empire, no USA.
4) This opens the way to the erroneous conclusion: that this disembodied transcendent Empire is a kind of historical progress over the nation-state. But it can't advance beyond the limits set by the dominant "network node", Washington/New York, while the USA draws strength from the "network" as nation-state territory. It could easily be invoked to support NATO, for instance, despite the fact that NATO is nothing but a global Great White Confederacy, Christian cross logo and all. Why is the only G7 country not a member, Japan? Nothing progressive in a white supremacist organization, last I heard - and that is what NATO unavoidably is.
5) The outline of an explanation I offered has more plausibility because it better captures it as a contradictory process - particular states appear to weaken while the State grows in strength, etc. The same with "neoliberalism" - in reality, the State grows stronger, increases its interventionism. The terms are a received ideological ruse. 6) H&Ns' root problem is their conception of the state. They first should have wrote a book called "State" - then moved on to "Empire". As Marx began with "Money", then moved on to "Capital" (the Empire of Money) - now there would be a valid parallelism! :-D
We still haven't overcome our 19th century notions of the state and have become, therefore, both its dependents and its prop.
But I have no problem with the use of the word "Empire", if all it really is, is a fashionable substitute for "imperialism". "Neoliberialism", though is another matter...
-Brad Mayer
> >it was a quote of a passage that expresses very well something I
> >enthusiastically agree with. The point is that technology and
> >internationalization are both very good things, in potential, but
> >that that potential is distorted and limited by their fate under
> >capitalism.
> >Doug
>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