This is Page One "news" from today's NY Sun. Sorry for length, but I don't think the text is available online.
The Pomo Marx & Engels By ADAM KIRSCH
Like a dog to its vomit, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri return in "Multitude" to the vapid and deeply irresponsible politics of their 2000 book, "Empire."
By fusing the favorite ideologies of the academic Left - Marxism and postmodernism - into a new theory of geopolitics, "Empire" won a surprising amount of attention: here, the New York Times proclaimed, was the "Next Big Idea" we had all been waiting for. The New Statesman called it "perhaps the most successful work to have come from the left for a generation."
Messrs. Hardt and Negri were anointed as the Marx and Engels of the new millennium. Now, having graduated from a university press to a trade publisher, they aim to move beyond academia and spread their ideas among a general readership.
Briefly, the thesis of "Empire" was that the age of the nation-state had come to an end. In place of sovereign states ruling limited territories, a new global regime was developing, in which transnational corporations, institutions like the World Bank, and nongovernmental organizations worked with traditional governments to impose order on the entire planet. The novelty of Empire, as Messrs. Hardt and Negri called it (the absence of the article giving it a tinge of science-fiction menace), is that "there is no more outside": neither in terms of geography, since all peoples are at least potentially subject to its authority, nor in terms of privacy, since its power goes beyond traditional capitalist exploitation to a total control of human life. Or, as they put it in a characteristic passage, "The absoluteness of imperial power is the complementary term to its complete immanence to the ontological machine of production and reproduction, and thus to the bio-political context."
The neologism "biopolitics," along with its cousin "biopower," is central to the argument. Messrs. Hardt and Negri use it to suggest that, in very late capitalism, the forms taken by labor make it inseparable from the rest of life. Labor is no longer restricted to the production of commodities for sale; instead, it is increasingly intellectual, immaterial, and affective, organized in networks and dependent on cooperative relationships. Here the postmodernist overturning of hierarchies and binarisms connects up with the Marxist theory of surplus value: Labor can be emancipated from capital because it has become as autonomous and self-organizing as life itself.
"Biopower," then, is an ambivalent term. On the one hand, it suggests the total subordination of human life to the exploitation of Empire: "The highest function of this power is to invest life through and through, and its primary task is to administer life." But at the same time, biopower means an organization of life and labor so complete that no transcendent authority, such as a state or a corporation, is any longer needed to govern it. Biopower "disrupts the linear and totalitarian figure of capitalist development." Thus Messrs. Hardt and Negri, while asserting their rejection of dialectical materialism, embrace Empire as part of a classic Marxist strategy of "heightening the contradictions": "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." Empire is to be embraced insofar as it hastens the revolution.
The reasons for the popularity of Messrs. Hardt and Negri's theory are not far to seek. Like Marxism, it is a theory of everything, purporting to explain the entire development of politics and economics after the Cold War. Like postmodern literary theory, however, it promotes private and symbolic gestures of transgression to the level of revolutionary acts: Even getting a tattoo can be construed, in Foucauldian fashion, as "refusal of the disciplinary regime." ("If you find your body refusing ... normal modes of life," they wrote in advice-columnist fashion, "don't despair - realize your gift!") By incorporating metaphors drawn from the latest technologies - above all, the Internet - it seems hard-headed and up-to-date; but by characterizing the eagerly awaited revolution in sunny, utopian-anarchist terms, it avoids any distasteful program of vanguardist violence.
In "Multitude" (Penguin Press, 410 pages, $27.95), Messrs. Hardt and Negri have set out to make their theory more user-friendly. For one thing, their writing has improved to a degree that will astonish anyone who struggled through the Marxist-Foucauldian dialect of "Empire." Along with the style, their ideas have undergone some cosmetic surgery. The concept of the multitude was already prominent in "Empire": The multitude was the postmodern proletariat, a virtuous and creative Prometheus bound to the rock of labor by the Zeus of Empire. But now the multitude takes center stage to such an extent that the idea of Empire virtually disappears: The focus has shifted entirely from oppression to liberation. Partly as a result, the authors of "Multitude" seem much more temperate, reformist, and democratic than the authors of "Empire."
Much of the change has to do with tone and temperament. At several points in "Empire," Messrs. Hardt and Negri reveled in flouting what they no doubt see as the oppressive pieties of liberal discourse. A minor instance is when they refer to an essay by Louis Althusser "written during his period of seclusion" - a "seclusion" he earned by murdering his wife, which the authors coyly deemed unworthy of mention. More serious is their outburst against what they see as Western intellectuals' unmerited concern with totalitarianism: "The notions of 'totalitarianism' that were constructed during the period of the cold war proved to be useful instruments for propaganda but completely inadequate analytical tools, leading most often to pernicious inquisitional methods and damaging moral arguments."
Well might Messrs. Hardt and Negri like to transfer the guilt for such "pernicious inquisitional methods" from the Cheka to, among others, Hannah Arendt, given their deep admiration for Lenin. "Empire" even ends with a paean to "the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist," a sentence whose moral idiocy, coming in the year 2000, hardly needs to be highlighted.
In "Multitude," however, the lightness and joy of being communist have been pretty well repressed. Messrs. Hardt and Negri still lay claim to the theoretical legacy of Marx, and even Lenin - they conclude with a section titled, with what no doubt seems to them roguish cleverness, "The New Science of Democracy: Madison and Lenin." (Quick quiz: was it Madison or Lenin who advised executing peasants "in such a way that for hundreds of versts around, the people will see, tremble, know, shout: They are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks"?)
But the tenor of the book is far from revolutionary. It lacks both the combativeness and the intellectual intrepidity of its predecessor; instead of a new theory of sovereignty, economics, and class struggle, "Multitude" offers a series of optimistic exhortations against war and globalization. Precisely because it is more ingratiating than "Empire," however, "Multitude" makes it imperative that the ruinous intellectual and moral deficiencies of Messrs. Hardt and Negri's big idea receive due scrutiny.
All of these flaws can be traced back, finally, to a weak sense of reality. The premise of "Empire" was that state power was giving way to a global conglomerate or conspiracy; as a corollary, wars would no longer be fought between states, but by Empire against all dissidents, in the form of a continual police action. This idea has been pretty well refuted by the events of the last two years, when the United States' war in Iraq was bitterly opposed by many of its alleged cohorts in Empire. Even before Iraq, however, it was clear that the Empire model could not describe the most deadly conflicts in the world over the last decade - neither the ethnic wars in Yugoslavia and Rwanda nor the nuclear rivalry between India and Pakistan. Only a powerful idee fixe could lead the authors to suppose that "imperial" intervention - as, for instance, in Kosovo - was a greater threat to humanity than the genocidal war that intervention was intended to stop.
The same ideological blinkers are in evidence when, in "Multitude," Messrs. Hardt and Negri say that Osama bin Laden "asks for legitimation by presenting himself as the moral hero of the poor and oppressed of the global South." In fact, bin Laden presents himself as no such thing; he is and declares himself to be a religious zealot dedicated to the imposition of Islamic law and the chastisement of the secular West. It is only in Messrs. Hardt and Negri's eyes that every violent movement in the world is ipso facto a liberation movement.
The same indifference to fact that nullifies their political analysis hobbles their philosophizing. At the core of their utopian promise is the notion of biopolitics - a realm in which economic, political, social, and cultural life are inseparable. It is biopower that Empire seeks to exploit, and it is biopower upon which the multitude can ground its autonomy and rebellion. But while Marx had Engels, who knew factory work at first hand, Messrs. Hardt and Negri never seem to have any real sense of what today's cooperative, networked labor is like for those who do it.
Is there any real commonality between the disparate categories of what they call immaterial laborers - software programmers, health care aides, television writers, genetic engineers, and retail salespeople? In what way does the actual experience of these types of work prepare people for building the anarchist utopia Messrs. Hardt and Negri promise is on the way? Here, as so often when humanists turn to the sciences, it seems that metaphors - the network, the code, the rhizome - have been wrenched from their original contexts and endowed with fantastic new meanings and powers.
Finally, and most crucially, what Messrs. Hardt and Negri lack is any genuine humanism. Like other ideologists of utopia, they reckon in categories so vast and abstract - multitude, empire - that actual human beings are no longer visible. The most alarming section of "Multitude" is a hymn to "swarm intelligence," in which a positively Orwellian immolation of the individual in the mass is seen as the condition of bliss: The multitude is imagined as a vast hive, filled with "the buzzing and swarming of the flesh."
But while Messrs. Hardt and Negri see this as an ideal commonwealth, built on "the real political act of love," it is actually a deeply sinister flight from the condition of all moral judgment and political action: the integrity of the individual human being. The flesh has appetites, the swarm has instincts, but only the human being has rights - a word significantly missing from these authors' vocabulary. Indeed, the seductiveness of their politics is that it promises to make rights unnecessary.
In the New Jerusalem, when the multitude governs itself directly, there will be no more rights because there will be no more wrongs. But anyone more respectful than Messrs. Hardt and Negri of fact, including the facts of history and of human nature, knows that we will never live in such a heaven; that every attempt to bring it down to earth has ended in catastrophe; and that the only hope of humanity lies not in love, but in justice.
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