Carrol
The economic theory of Empire proves to be a minefield, which is, among other things, starkly illustrated by the difficulty reviewers have had in summarizing it. Writing in the London Review of Books, Malcolm Bull tries his best: "Since Marx had shown that social relations were not, in fact, the seamless web of bourgeois mythology, but rather the battlefield of economic conflict, the class struggle could be waged more effectively if the working class disengaged from waged labour and sought autonomy for itself."14 This primary postulate of the book that which must be allowed for everything else to follow can be more baldly put: liberation is achieved by declaring oneself "autonomous," by "disengaging" from labor. Autonomy is about proclaiming autonomy. Not only Bull but other reviewers like Gopal Balakrishnan and John Kraniauskas have had trouble convincingly characterizing the substance of the argument because it is so obviously tautological.15 It is an inauspicious beginning for a project that Bull, apparently without irony, dubs "the most successful work of political theory to come from the Left for a generation."16
If it is odd to propose an economic analysis of the condition of labor by recusing labor from the economy, what follows is far more formulaic than an apparently radical proposition might lead one to expect. For the portrait of economic change offered by Hardt and Negri bears a striking resemblance to the sort of analysis routinely offered by The Economist and the Wall Street Journal: namely, that capitalism has abruptly realigned its economic priorities in favor of the intellectual component in formerly manual work, a process to which the new Italians assign the term immaterial labor. The language of management theory has for over a decade bulged with a figural repertoire demoting sweat and muscle in favor of "skills," "insights," "ideas," and "speed." It is now little more than a cliché of the management genre. And yet, apart from the belatedness of "discovering" this largely fictional fact about the new economy, this is a scenario that Empire's authors do not merely lament. Rather like the columnists of the business press, they are encouraged by this systemic shift (in much the way that in the early 1990s the post-Fordist critics of "New Times" discussed the oppositional potential of consumption and the attendant subversiveness of the decentering introduced by niche marketing).17 While enlivening its terminologies by placing them in new philosophical registers, the authors' devotion to New Times credos is unwavering. 18
Against the backdrop of a vast manual system of interlocking, armed work farms in the clothing industry, the prison-labor system, massive new infrastructural projects (in the laying of fiber optic cable, for example), and new arctic drilling ventures, the world economy is for Hardt and Negri resolutely "post-industrial." Even as Brussels vetoes U.S. corporate mergers, George W. Bush raises steel tariffs, and Chile indicts Henry Kissinger as a material witness in the trial of General Augusto Pinochet, the nation-state, we are told, has lost all sovereignty. In what can only be called a bracero economy of controlled "illegal" immigration and the reinstitution of slavery (in the Chinese tenement halls of the United States as well as in rural Sudan and Myanmar), we are told that knowledge rather than brute physicality is the constituent element of new labor. Consequently, the supersession of manual by mental or immaterial labor turns out to be a matter of faith rather than anything resembling an analysis of the record.
NOTES
14. Malcolm Bull, "You Can't Build a New Society with a Stanley Knife," review of Empire, by Hardt and Negri, in London Review of Books, 4 Oct. 2001, p. 3.
15. Although invariably marked by circumspection, not all of the public response has been adulatory. Gopal Balakrishnan faults Empire for its "series of dubious assumptions" (Gopal Balakrishnan, "Virgilian Visions," review of Empire, by Hardt and Negri, in New Left Review 5 [Sept.Oct. 2000]: 145); John Kraniauskas is skeptical of the book's "neo-positivist ontology of becoming" (John Kraniauskas, "Empire, or Multitude: Transnational Negri," review of Empire, by Hardt and Negri, in Radical Philosophy 103 [Sept.Oct. 2003]: 35).
16. At times dismissive of Empire's argument, Bull too is circumspect. He swings from condescension to overpraise, as though worried that a blunter contestation on his part would consign him under the current hegemony to the ranks of the out-of-touch. When one reflects on what books are excluded by Bull's judgmentAlexander Cockburn's Corruptions of Empire, Thomas Frank's One Market under God, Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, John Ross's Shadows of Tender Fury, Fredric Jameson's The Cultural Turn, and Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century the statement seems not only unmeasured, but absurd.
17. "New Times" as a purported cultural dominant is associated with circles around the (now-defunct) British journal Marxism Today in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Several writers argued that systemic transformations in capitalism had forced the Left to place a new emphasis on consumerism, abandon the emphasis on industrial labor, and jettison the goals of the welfare state. See New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, ed. Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (London, 1990).
18. One notes here a new and different dilemma in cultural theory about which very little has been written: distraction. There are in practice too many distractions in the course of reading a book like Empire to be deterred by its preparatory ideas. They may nag at the reader's attention, but since there is already so much that needs a response, he or she conspires in solidifying its assumptions further by failing to contest them and does so by constraint because the debate has already moved on to another place. To question the predicates, at any rate, is seen as lagging behind the game, for the participants have already agreed to agree about ideas whose truth-value is based above all on their prevalence.