[lbo-talk] Re: Beyond Globophobia

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

> Hardt and Negri will have none of 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.
>
> In our normal work lives, we're all linked--often invisibly-- with a vast network of people, from across the office or
> factory to the other side of the world. Standard globalization narratives, mainstream or critical, often efface this fact,
> seeing capital, rather than the billions who produce the goods and services that the world lives on, as the dominant
> creative force. That cooperative labor deserves to be acknowledged in itself, as the creative force that it is, but also as a
> source of great potential power. Empire uses a lyric from Ani DiFranco as one of its epigraphs: "Every tool is a
> weapon if you hold it right." They could have also used a line from Patti Smith: "We created it. Let's take it over."
>

How do you take it over without taking power at the level of a state?

Yoshie