Anthony Tothe wrote:
>
>
> .I read 50 or so pages and gave up.. came off as gibberish to me..and
> anything that has the word "post" attached to it makes me wince. Also,
> judging from some of the reviews of it-like the one on the Znet home page-it
> didn't seem like they had all that much to say. But whenever anyone starts
> using dense language and concepts when discussing world affairs-this isn't
> physics-I get very skeptical that they really have anything of value to say.
The language of parts of Capital I is dense; the language of the _Grundrisse_ is dense. The language of Whitehead's _Process & Reality_ is dense. The language of _Empire_ is fluffy pretending to be dense. (The pretense perhaps fooled the authors themselves as well as some of their readers.) It's appeal is that it promises revolution without working for one, and without incorporating self-criticism into a revolutionary movement. The Multitude is like the Pope: infallible.
The claim that its "difficulty" is only in its using a vocabulary from a different tradition merely confirms its fluffiness. The book sets itself up in competition with _Capital_. When you are pretending to operate in that domain, you _have_ to be dense, not merely promise in an empty footnote that the density exists someplace else.
Carrol