>> 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."
Doug precedes this with:
> Along those lines, there's an inspiring quote from Michael Hardt and
> Antonio Negri's Empire. The book itself is not without its
> problems--prolixity and abstraction to start with--but at least two
> things are welcome about its megahit status. One is its theoretical
> ambition, its attempt to think about the dispersed, hard-to-specify
> nature of power today. Another is its optimism, thanks to its roots in
> autonomist Marxism, an approach that emphasizes the creative and
> revolutionary power of workers on their own, and not expressed through
> state or party. Next to typical left pessimism, autonomists can seem
> dreamily optimistic, seeing struggle and victory where others see
> apathy and defeat. And closely related to that cheeriness is its
> absolute refusal to look backward. A lot of supposedly progressive
> thinkers and activists would love to recover a lost world of
> nation-states or self-sufficient localities.
The "dreamily optimistic" is a problem in so far as it's based on denying reality. As I said some time ago, Hardt and Negri don't take a developmental view of human nature. The result is that they think the "multitude" already has "the creative and revolutionary power" required for a "socialist project."
Among other things, this seems inconsistent with the facts pointed to on pp. 75-8 of Doug's marvelous new book. It may be that globalization is a process of "education" (in the sense of "bildung") that will develop "character" in a way that actualizes the "the creative and revolutionary power" of the "multitude," but nothing Hardt and Negri say demonstrates this. The question doesn't arise within the theoretical framework they adopt.
Ted