By Lee Harris
http://www.policyreview.org/dec02/harris.html A specter haunts the world, and that specter is America. This is not the America discoverable in the pages of a world atlas, but a mythical America that is the target of the new form of anti-Americanism that Salman Rushdie, writing in the Guardian (February 6, 2002), says “is presently taking the world by storm” and that forms the subject of a Washington Post essay by Martin Kettle significantly entitled “U.S. Bashing: It’s All The Rage In Europe” (January 7, 2002). It is an America that Anatol Lieven assures us, in a recent article in the London Review of Books, is nothing less than “a menace to itself and to mankind” and that Noam Chomsky has repeatedly characterized as the world’s major terrorist state.
But above all it is the America that is responsible for the evils of the rest of the world. As Darius Fo, the winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize for literature, put it in a notorious post-September 11 email subsequently quoted in the New York Times (September 22, 2001): “The great speculators [of American capitalism] wallow in an economy that every years kills tens of millions of people with poverty [in the Third World] — so what is 20,000 dead in New York? Regardless of who carried out the massacre [of 9-11], this violence is the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger and inhumane exploitation.”
It is this sort of America that is at the hub of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s revision of Marxism in their intellectually influential book Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000) — a reinterpretation of historical materialism in which the global capitalist system will be overthrown not by those who have helped to create it, namely, the working class, but rather by a polyglot global social force vaguely referred to as “the multitude” — the alleged victims of this system. Full: http://www.policyreview.org/dec02/harris.html --- Sent from UnionMail Service [http://mail.union.org.za]