Empire: Hardt responds

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>[I forwarded some of the comments on Empire to Michael Hardt. Here's 
>his response, which he asked me to forward with the caveat that he 
>can only reply to some reactions and probably with a certain delay.]
>
>Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 13:19:10 -0500 (EST)
>From: Michael Hardt <hardt at duke.edu>
>
>I think it is important to view Empire or globalization as multifaceted
>phenomena, which comprise a variety of processes and elements.  My
>position is that Empire is a negative development (it brings new, more
>intense and more brutal forms of exploitation and domination, greater gap
>between rich and poor and within national space, terrifying oppression
>through military means and starvation, etc), but it is also simultaneously
>a positive development in that it creates greater potential for
>liberation.  Marx regarded the advent of capital and the destruction of
>the feudal mode of production in Europe much the same way.
>
>It is convenient to express this paradoxical negative and positive
>evaluation in dialectical form (as if the negation will lead through a
>dialectical twist to a positive outcome), but I think this is
>misleading.  It is better, I think, to separate out the positive and
>negative processes -- separate them conceptually at least because in the
>present form of capitalist globalization they go together.  Pushing the
>negative aspects or processes to an extreme will only make things worse,
>but pushing the positive aspects to an extreme could lead to transformation.
>
>One example of a positive process that Marx deals with is the increased and
>intensified networks of social cooperation created by capital.  Lenin
>similarly (in his Imperialism book) deals with the socialization of
>production in the imperialist stage of capital.  Both of these processes
>are equally relevant today.  These are ways in which Empire is
>progressive or, more precisely, in which Empire creates the greater
>potential for revolution.
>
>Michael

In concrete political terms, how does one further the process of the 
creation of "the increased and intensified networks of social 
cooperation" without pushing "the negative aspects of processes to an 
extreme" (and vice versa) under capitalism & imperialism?

Yoshie