Empire - Michael Hardt/Antonio Negri

[bretty]

I'm currently reading through this book. Has anyone read it? if so, what are your thoughts so far on the book?

I feel they make several good points in the book about the changing force of industry and the surplus population of unemployed or informal workers in the world. However Aihwa Ong makes some counter propositions from an anthropological perspective that do hold some truth. She claims that the cultural context of the multitude will hinder global organization.

What do you think of the book? Also if you google it, there is a free copy in pdf format.

[svenne]

I read it, under a period of a half year. It's a pretty hard book to read, but when you reach the middle of it, it get's easier.

If you ignore the more strange philosophical parts, there is some interesting stuff about the change in economy. Mostly in part 3 of the book.

I would honestly not recommend anybody to read it on the net, it's a pretty long book...

If i am not wrong, this file
: eurozine.com/articles/2002-02-13-hardtnegri-en.html is a short intro to The Empire.

[al8]

Mike and Antonio recently came to Iceland and held a lecture. My opinion of them is that they bring nothing new to communism except new jargon. Which is unhelpful in furthering things further.

They as well have, in line with other philosopher-types, a strong inclination to have things high-sounding and unclear. I suspect they do this because they have to make a living in a publish-or-perish environment, and making up new jargon is a great excuse to write new articles and books, going on tour explaining your eccentricities, etc.

Their replacing of the working(/producing) class for 'the multitude', because people are no longer doing 'classical' grunt work that is 'productive' (by what stantard?*) to same degree and are instead doing more work that is 'mental', 'informal', 'company image'-related stuff just smacks of confusion and a lack of a materialist and scientific account of the process at hand.

*By standard I mean is it productive in the communistic sense of it being useful or is it productive in the capitalist sense of it bringing in profit/being sellable.
These distictions are not clear in the heads of these academics as they are against utopias. In effect that always boils down to believing the right wing credo; There is no alternative (to capitalism). For revolutionary visionaries to say such a thing is awkward and a sign of decadence, for in no other profession where goals and cources of action actually matter, is this anti-plan, anti-brainstorming, anti-vision, anti-policy attitude accepted. Not in war, not in architecture, not in tasks that matter.

[Agrippa]

Empire by Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri[/B] or the modern hiccups of old revisionism"]

Dear comrades, dear readers, you might not be aware of it, but we have done you a big favour: we read “Empire”, the stodgy book by Negri and Hardt, which some “anti-globalisation” militants have already turned into their bible. Heavy, philosophical, and speculative, boring and irritating, very trendy and, above all, completely counterrevolutionary, this big book obviously strives to become one of the guidebooks of the anti-globalisation struggles. In a few paragraphs, this is what Negri & Hardt tell us. The modern epoch is over. Verdun, Nazism, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Sabra and Shatila… such modernity has come to the end, and is outdated. Globalisation has put an end to the power of the nation-state that was responsible for imperialist wars and we should be happy about it. We have entered the era of post-modernism.
With the end of colonial regimes, and above all with the fall of the USSR and barriers that the latter opposed to the worldwide capitalist market, we witnessed globalisation of economical and cultural exchanges. Substituting the nation-state, a new form of sovereignty, a new political subject appeared: the Empire. It doesn’t refer specifically to the United States even though that country plays a key role in the Empire and it doesn’t mean imperialism either. “The United States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project. Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in the way modern European nations were.” (1) It is a “de-territorialised” power that extends to all social life. “(...) Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers.”
Contrary to the traditional left-wing that is not particularly keen on this globalisation and would like to hinder circulation of capital, Negri and his colleague Hardt are not opposed to the globalisation of relations, for them, the enemy is “a specific regime of global relations that we call Empire,” but “(…) the fact that against the old powers of Europe a new Empire has formed is only good news. Who wants to see any more of that pallid and parasitic European ruling class that led directly from the ancien régime to nationalism, from populism to fascism, and now pushes for a generalized neoliberalism? Who wants to see more of those ideologies and those bureaucratic apparatuses that have nourished and abetted the rotting European élites? And who can still stand those systems of labor organization and those corporations that have stripped away every vital spirit?” Contrary to what the traditional left-wing says, the Empire is therefore a positive reality that “does away with the cruel regimes of modern power” and renders the organisation of counter-powers by levelling reality everywhere, making it ever more supranational. The Empire makes the alternative possible, better, it creates it: the Empire is nothing but “the fabric of an ontological human dimension that tends to be universal.” That human being expresses itself in the “resistances, struggles and desires” of a “new proletariat”, a new subject: “the multitude”. “The creative forces of the multitude that sustains the Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges. The struggles to contest and subvert the Empire, as well as those to construct a real alternative, will thus take place on the imperial terrain itself - indeed, such new struggles have already begun to emerge. Through these struggles and many more, the multitude will have to invent new democratic forms and a new constituent power that will one day take us through and beyond Empire.”



One of the historical characteristics of reformism is to start from revolutionary terminology and concepts in order to subsequently redefine them and drain them of their subversive substance. The philosophical-sociological soup that Negri & Hardt try to sell to the anti-globalisation sympathisers is no exception to the rule: they call themselves communists, they criticise traditional left-wing, claim allegiance to the “class struggle’s school”, quote K. Marx at every opportunity, refer to Engels, Lenin, Debord or Foucault, describe capitalist society and talk about variable capital, value, real and formal subsumption, internationalism… but in the end, the fundamental points of the communist programme, those that express the qualitative step between capitalism and communism have vanished; no organisation in force, no dictatorship of the proletariat, no abolition of value, no revolution. Every concept they use is disguised as a simple programmatical extension, a development due to the movements of history, however, with a closer look, it becomes obvious they underwent such political deviancy that their original revolutionary content was entirely devoid of its substance.

From the very beginning of the book, the authors lay their cards on the table. They start with recounting some aspects of capitalism history and of class struggle and they try to demonstrate the current omnipotence of capital on all aspects of life, but this description of capitalist dictatorship immediately turns into a conventional reproduction of the ruling ideology. So, in the wake of the ideologies that try to sell to the proletariat “a new means of struggle” or “new exploitation conditions”, the Negri-Hardt couple endeavours to portray the present symptoms of capitalist development (monopoly tendencies, fall of the protectionist barriers, strengthening of the free-exchange fraction, increased centralisation of the means of repression, etc.) as a new age of capitalism: globalised capitalism. Where we see nothing but the continuity of the capital’s encroachments, the crisis intensification, the progress of capitalist barbarity, Negri and Hardt sing along with all those who hope to serve us at all cost the same old capitalist shit in a new tureen. According to them as well as to Bernstein almost a century ago, there is a “new capitalism”, globalisation. Of course they claim they criticise this “new age” but the fact is that from the very start they leave the way open for justifications and revision of the proletarian tasks. According to the authors, the new era that is opening –globalisation- calls the proletariat to new tasks. This will lead them, through a series of “Marxist” reasoning and developments, to a total revision on the issue of the destruction of the state.

But let’s not go too fast. This terminological stowage to globalisation, to the present bourgeois ideology, is only a starter. It would never pique the interest of the social democrat intelligentsia hanging about the anti-globalisation movement, if it was not accompanied by some new modernity. We shall skip the passage on the change from modern to post-modern epoch, (let us however point out the gem defining the Empire as a positive reality that “does away with the cruel regimes of modern power” and not forget the so new symptom of a so-called “renewed interest in and effectiveness of the concept of bellum justum, or ‘just war’,” supposed to be specific to the Empire, as if every imperialist war didn’t try to define itself that way). We shall now deal with the authors’ vision of the present struggles.

For them, the present struggles “under the Empire” determine “not the appearance of a new cycle of internationalist struggles, but rather the emergence of a new quality of social movements”. It is logical: if there is a new capitalism, there must be a new quality of social movements! As always, using the excuse of a new situation, today is disconnected from yesterday by defining “new” characteristics of the present struggles, by giving them a “new” quality, by assigning other tasks to the “new proletariat”, to the “multitude”. In this context, all that relates to the analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of past struggles becomes irrelevant to the nature and the quality of the present day struggles. Today, no more internationalist struggles (because they would no longer communicate horizontally, they would directly and vertically attack the summit –the Empire- and blah blah blah). Instead, “radically different, biopolitical movements” (economic, political and cultural, in the authors’ jargon) determined by a “new” composition of the proletariat and by the appearance of a “new” subject: the multitude and its desires.

“The composition of the proletariat has transformed and thus our understanding of it must too. In conceptual terms we understand proletariat as a broad category that includes all those whose labor is directly or indirectly exploited by and subjected to capitalist norms of production and reproduction. In a previous era the category of the proletariat centered on and was at times effectively subsumed under the industrial working class, whose paradigmatic figure was the male mass factory worker. That industrial working class was often accorded the leading role over other figures of labor (such as peasant labor and reproductive labor) in both economic analyses and political movements. (...) We need to look more concretely at the form of the struggles in which this new proletariat expresses its desires and needs.”

Let us point out that although the “new” subject –the multitude- hasn’t been introduced yet, we are already up to the neck in the social democrat conception of social classes. The proletariat isn’t described with regards to its movement, in its antagonism against the bourgeoisie, to capital; neither it is defined according to its project, its history, its party, and its struggles. The proletariat remains a mere static object to be analysed in its immobility and its immediacy, in the same way as it is pictured by the whole of social democracy, just as Stalinism conceives it. According to Negri, the central role is now played by the modern immaterial labour workers vis à vis the industrial workers of old, and their characteristics are to be “studied”. Of course, the sociology of this new “central” exploited determines new tasks and new goals.

Therefore, the authors resort to the concept of proletariat (in a static and twisted way) but they do so only in order to end up putting forth its opposite: the multitude. And so, from one thing leading to another, starting with the exploited worker and the internationalist proletarian, jumping from the industrial labour force to the immaterial one, they finally arrive at the multitude: “Does that same uncontainable desire for freedom that broke and buried the nation-state and that determined the transition toward Empire still live beneath the ashes of the present, the ashes of the fire that consumed the internationalist proletarian subject that was centered on the industrial working class? What has come to stand in the place of that subject? In what sense can we say that the ontological rooting of a new multitude has come to be a positive or alternative actor in the articulation of globalization?” (...) “Far from being defeated, the revolutions of the twentieth century have each pushed forward and transformed the terms of class conflict, posing the conditions of a new political subjectivity, an insurgent multitude against imperial power.” This is how, while fiercely professing the “school of class struggle” and the existence of the proletariat, they take the slippery slope of the “new capitalist conditions” to gently slide down to the “new tasks” and finally, after passing through the “new political subjectivity”, they end up with the dissolution of the proletariat into the multitude. Sorry, the “new” multitude!

The way Negri-Hardt insist on affixing the word “new” to every concept and the frequency with which this adjective appears in every page of the book are proportional to the lack of “real novelty” contained in this umpteenth reformist plea for a “world of cooperation”. The same old symptoms of the discoverers resurface “new phases”, “new philosophies”, “new subjects”: recuperation of all sorts of historical references, description of this world of misery and repression, appeal to submit to the trendy reformist movements, prediction about a world on the verge of collapse… and in the end, no concrete means, no perspectives, no concrete directions for action.

Chapters and chapters about the “world order”, the “decline of nation-state”, the “American sovereignty and the new empire”, the “capitalist sovereignty or the administration of global society” and, when at last, at the end of the book, perspectives are announced… nothing, emptiness!

But let us rather admire the masterpiece: “It is a matter of recognizing and engaging the imperial initiatives and not allowing them continually to reestablish order; it is a matter of crossing and breaking down the limits and segmentations that are imposed on the new collective labor power [another “newness”!], it is a matter of gathering together these experiences of resistance and wielding them in concert against the nerve centers of imperial command.”

After 254 pages of philosophy, the authors finally talk about concrete action, social practice. We get to the crucial moment of the book, at the transition between critical theory and practical action introducing the “What is to be done?” at the qualitative step…

“This task for the multitude, however, although it is clear at a conceptual level, remains rather abstract. What specific and concrete practices will animate this political project? We cannot say at this point.”

A real chef d’œuvre: 265 pages of “radical thinking” to admit that they have no idea of the “specific and concrete practices that will animate this political project”… A confession of powerlessness released with such a cheek that it would make any politician publicly commenting the employment perspectives turn green with envy!

Of course, it is not completely true, because a good reformist must put forward one or another concrete perspective, and if one manages to get over the disappointment induced by this confession of powerlessness, he is nonetheless quickly given some leads. Negri and Hardt got together to be stronger in their propositions and they kept the best part for the end: “What we can see nonetheless is a first element of a political program for the global multitude, a first political demand: global citizenship.”

And there it goes! For those who might still have doubts about the counterrevolutionary, self-managementist, intentions of the authors, all becomes clear now. Negri & Hardt demand an identity card for all, they urge to request from every state a juridical acknowledgement of migrations, they encourage the multitude to demand control over the migratory movements (sic), etc. “The general right to control its own movement is the multitude's ultimate demand for global citizenship.” If you didn’t understand everything, don’t worry, neither did the authors! The important thing is to show to which point, beyond the realm of good philosophical intentions, highbrow Marxism doesn't have to envy the utmost vulgar reformism. Bill Clinton demands “a universal health care card”, Toni Negri wants residency permits for everyone, which means “in the first place that all should have the full rights of citizenship in the country where they live and work.”

Let us quickly leaf through the labour issue, this “fundamental creative activity of the multitude” and through the right for a “social wage and a guaranteed income for all”! Let us say no more. In fact we can skip it all and rush to the conclusions of the book to get a straight idea of up to where these Marxologists and other philosophers lead us.

Of course, we could wonder if, from the communist point of view, all this is really worth reading, analysing and criticising. Some elements of the Negri-Hardt programme are so ridiculous this is certainly a legitimate question. But with “Empire”, Negri and Hardt specifically target the radical fringe of the anti-globalisation movement: the philosophy of the book is designed to meet needs of certain radicality at work within the anti-globalisation movement. It is precisely when the proletariat will try to break away from the pacifist and/or anti-organizational ideologies that pollute this milieu, it's at the very moment when the qualitative step that will make the struggle against capitalism operational will be at stake, that the ideology of “the Empire and the multitude” will play the role of a rampart and prevent the development and the generalisation of further ruptures. The purpose of flattering the “anti-globalisation movement” is to submit it to its own weaknesses, to ensnare it into a merely spectacular critique of capitalism, a critique fed by ideas as well organised and responsible as the demonstrations in which they express themselves. That is to say a “critique” that never takes action.

The “radical” ideologies that tomorrow will hamper or even paralyse the anti-capitalist movement are being shaped today. So, when the proletariat will show its will to assault private property, they will come up with things like: it is no longer necessary because “producing increasingly means constructing cooperation and communication commonalities” and in this sense, “the concept of private property itself (…) becomes increasingly nonsensical…”; it is “the community that produces and that, while producing, is reproduced and redefined” even if “the juridical and political regimes of private property” have not been eliminated yet and “private property, despite its juridical powers, cannot help becoming an ever more abstract and transcendental concept and thus ever more detached from reality.”And there you have it! Given that private property does not exist anymore (or nearly so), our action can be of two kinds: become aware and bring to the multitude the awareness that private property has disappeared, and then demand the resignation of the empty shells –the political and juridical regimes- that support it.

“(…) today we participate in a more radical and profound commonality than has ever been experienced in the history of capitalism. (…) Our economic and social reality is defined by (...) co-produced services and relationships.” Given that we live in co-operation, communication and community, all we have to do is to discover that we are the real masters of the world. It is simple, it’s all written down: “The Empire pretends to be the master of that world because it can destroy it. What a horrible illusion! In reality we are masters of the world because our desire and labour regenerate it continuously. (…) In biopolitical society the decision of the sovereign can never negate the desire of the multitude.”

The revolutionary violence, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the organization of our class as a force are written off! No need for them, since we already are the masters of the world, and the power is incapable of denying our desires. The millions of proletarians who are dying of hunger and anguish around the world will surely be very happy to hear this! As they were just beginning to cast serious doubts on the capitalists’ ability to heed their desires, Negri arrives, to dispel their fears.

But Negri goes even further: he tries to recuperate Marx’s watchword about the destruction of the State by amalgamating it with a claim for self-government. Of course, we have never imagined Negri as an enemy of the State; besides, he clarified this point publicly on several occasions. But the revision he makes here is absolutely remarkable: he manages to have Marx say exactly the opposite of what he meant, by some good old revisionist trick! It is almost as funny as the banknotes of the former “socialist countries”, which displayed Marx’s face on them. Just check it out: Negri & Hardt tell us that the “Big government is over”. First they insist on the fact that they disagree with the way the “American conservatives” used those terms to mock the “democrats”. They nevertheless specify that “Certainly, having been educated in class struggle, we know well that big government has also been an instrument for the redistribution of social wealth and that, under the pressure of working class struggle, it has served in the fight for equality and democracy.” Good old social democrat theory, according to which the state isn’t the organisation of the ruling class as a force but a mere neutral tool that can be used by any class of the society. No comments! But Negri goes even further: this epoch is over. The big socialist and communist governments led to the concentration camps… By reminding us that, 150 years ago, Marx already denounced that all past revolutions had only improved the state rather than destroyed it, Negri explains that the current mode of economical organisation renders the assault against the state obsolete, useless, and that the only possibility lies in “labour power constituting itself as a government”… which he defines as destruction of the state. That’s it! “No, we are not anarchists but communists who have seen how much repression and destruction of humanity has been wrought by liberal and socialist big governments. We have seen how all this being re-created in imperial government, just when the circuits of productive cooperation have made labour power as a whole capable of constituting itself in government.” The Negri-Hardt theories have eliminated any reference to revolutionary violence, to the proletariat organization as a force, to the assault on private property… and they now equate the government of their yearning (a government of global citizenship, of active democracy) to the destruction of the state!

You can see right through it. But we have now come full cycle and can presently sum up again the idea of the book: “Empire” seeks, throughout its chapters, to portray the world as unified, globalised, subsumed by an imperial order that exerts its control everywhere and nowhere at the same time. In that world, all the levels of its constituting pyramid take part in its reproduction. The Empire extends its domination over all aspects of social life, but on the other side “life, desire, community” express themselves everywhere. Labour is production of life. NGOs, for instance, transform politics into an issue, which concerns generic life and they extend their action on the whole of the biopolitical space. “Here, at this broadest, most universal level, the activities of these NGOs coincide with the workings of Empire ‘beyond politics,’ on the terrain of biopower, meeting the needs of life itself.”

The Empire extends its kingdom beyond the nation-state, beyond politics, everywhere and upon everything but it cannot prevent the development of forces developing generic life, and its sovereigns are constrained to obey to the desires of the multitude. Empire and multitude are two coinciding realities. Property has a mere juridical existence. Everything belongs to the community. Little more is needed to move on to another world. We are close to the conclusion. How? In a peaceful way, and of course, not by seeking to take the “command”, but by self-organising as a government.

Will the chapter on militancy be more explicit?

“We should say right away that this new militancy does not simply repeat the organizational formulas of the old revolutionary working class.” Well, we were sure expecting something like a “new” militancy! “Militants resist imperial command in a creative way. In other words, resistance is linked immediately with a constitutive investment in the biopolitical realm and to the formation of cooperative apparatuses of production and community.” Did we hear “communisation”? Did we hear “self management”?

“There is an ancient legend that might serve to illuminate the future life of communist militancy: that of Saint Francis of Assisi. (…) To denounce the poverty of the multitude he adopted that common condition and discovered there the ontological power of a new society. The communist militant does the same…”

Let us mingle with the anti-globalisation sympathisers, with the NGO’s sisters, let us work hand in hand with the cooperation priests…

“Once again in postmodernity we find ourselves in Francis’s situation, posing against the misery of power the joy of being. This is a revolution that no power will control - because biopower and communism, cooperation and revolution remain together, in love, simplicity, and also innocence. This is the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist.”

Amen!

In the end, a lot of abstractions, and a lot of religion, to worship the present world. Just as Bernstein revealed what social democracy was doing “silently” when claiming “aloud” that violent revolution was an outdated idea, Negri describes the immediate reality of the so-called anti-globalisation movement (in fact, the social democrat “anti-globalisation” practise and ideology operating within the proletarian movements that attack capitalism). He puts into words and perspectives the movement’s most reformist content (NGOs, the ideology of cooperation, pacifism, charity…), flirts with its self-management tendencies, praises its worst weaknesses and finally sells the image of its own misery: lack of revolutionary subject, exaltation of the “refusal”, pacifism, ideology of conscience-bringing, self-management and self-government, Consequence: his book is an excellent theorization of the reformism present in today’s movements.

No revolutionary action, the monopoly of violence surrendered into the hands of the state, no attack against private property, value, no confrontation with the antagonist class, no organization… just a bit of NGOs, a bit of claiming for a worldwide citizenship and a real democracy, a bit of confused ethics and philosophy, a bit of love for the multitude, a bit of commiseration and a lot, an awful lot of idealism and self management.

In short, we started with a denunciation of the reinforcement of the capitalist control over the human beings and we ended up with a claim for “an organization of productive and political power as a biopolitical unity managed by the multitude, organized by the multitude, directed by the multitude - absolute democracy in action.” In the most genuine populist tradition of left-wing capitalism and Stalinism (which the authors claim they reject), they started from the proletariat and ended up denying its historical role and praising its dissolution into a peaceful and democratic multitude.
Note
1. We decided not to bother our readers with precise numbers of pages, as we definitely don’t consider “Empire” as a book to be read. Nevertheless all the quotations we use in this text come from: Hardt, M., Negri, A.: “Empire”, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, Harward University Press, 2000; and can be found there. The PDF version can be downloaded from: http://www.infoshop.org/texts/empire.pdf http://gci-icg.org/english/communism14.htm#empire

[black magick hustla]

I have not read the book but I think I have an idea about it. While this might be an ignorant opinion, I think the idea that there is a big "empire" its silly at best. It is true we have entered a new epoch, and there is a reaosn why so many academics have spoken about it - whether postmodernity or whatever. The ICC has a name for this epoch, which it calls decomposition. While it is true that big imperialist blocks are waning, this just means there is a further factionalization of the bourgeosie.

Instead of big imperialist wars we get conflicts in the micro scales, but that are generalized. No more soviets vs americans, but now there are civil wars, mob-capitalists, and the rise of new imperialist blocklets like the Russian-Chinese faction, Ango-American faction, etc. Nowhere in time has barbarism and war been so generalized. WE dont have WWII, but we have Africa, depression, drug violence, and local conflicts.

[Asoka89]

I've read it and I am not a Trot or a Spart, but here http://icl-fi.org/english/esp/59/empire.html

This is a good critique if you can parse through some of the ridiculous declearations in it.

[makesi]

I read it twice; I had to read it a second time for a class. I got a somewhat better appreciation for the argument the second time around, unfortunately its not fresh on my mind since that was over 3 years ago.

The book has some good criticisms of postmodernism, a good criticism and understanding of some of the new ways in which racism embodied in the new ideology of Empire, viz. in that it embraces difference in order to essentialize it and they go on from there.

I'd have to look back through my notes but, to me, the book is consistent to a good extent with Negri's overall evolution but goes further towards creating a socio-political ontology of conflict and resistance, the newest embodiment of this resistance (or constituent and constituting--as opposed to constituted, i.e. congealed, enrusted forms of power, e.g. state power) being the multitude, his nebulous concept for the new center (although his philosophy doesn't really allow for a "center," it seems to me) or source of resistance to the domination of empire.

I never finished reading their follow-up book "Multitude" (I got far enough to see they had a somewhat interesting critique of Samuel Huntington) but it seemed to me that reading Empire was probably sufficient for getting a more or less comprehensive grasp of their ideas.

Alex Callinicos has made some decent criticism of them. I saw the Spart criticism of them back when I was at grad school and a member of the Sparts tried to get me to read the review/bashing that their publication did. The problem I remember with the review was that the authors somewhat missed the boat on Empire, simply classifying it as a replication of Kautsky's superimperialism (which I dont think is a totally wrong characterization) and then proceeding to largely ignore the book with a short historical exegesis of a mishmash of events.

[sunfarstar]

我读了她的中文版的书，并且买了四本送给我的老师和同志。这本书很好。叙事结构很宏大，也有方 法。

[kalu]

I read Empire a couple years back, and Multitude twice. I only recently "got" the argument, after getting acquainted with the likes of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.

There are way too many incoherent summaries floating around, so I'll just give a brief one before moving on to my criticisms:

Hardt and Negri propose that in place of the old Empires such as Britain and France, we have moved to a deterritorialized Empire composed of a global sovereign (the US, the G8), aristocracy (the IMF, World Bank) and people (NGOs). This is really a theory of what has mistakenly been called "globalization," and it's obvious Hardt and Negri are yet another set of contributors to the topic of "neoliberalism" and in particular the social and economic upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s which has led to such things as IMF structural adjustment programmes and Harvey-esque "flexible accumulation."

Hardt and Negri are proposing that their darstellung, method of presentation, begins with Empire, but in fact their forschung, object of research, is the new subject of resistance, the Multitude. The Multitude is all the people all over the world resisting capitalist globalization, who despite their differences come together and produce a common consisting in immaterial knowledge. Hardt and Negri refer to this as "singularity-commonality." The common is in fact exploited by Empire, and Hardt and Negri refer to this as a regime of biopower (see Foucault), or the control over life itself. Hardt and Negri are unsatisfied with orthodox Marxist accounts of center-periphery and world systems analysis, and thus they give their own postmodern spin to the "diffusion of power" through various social capillaries.

I think many criticisms of Hardt and Negri have been quite lazy. For example, the claim that they were proven "wrong" when Bush invaded Iraq, signalling perhaps the return to good old-fashioned imperialism (versus Empire's imperial, ie. deterritorialized, nature). The US has obviously crash landed in the Middle East, as Immanuel Wallerstein put it. More importantly, this criticism does not deal at a significant theoretical level with Hardt and Negri's argument.

My concern with them really lies with their abandoment of the theory of surplus value. While the Multitude is being "exploited" for its immaterial knowledge, and certainly we ought to move beyond archaic industrial working-class unionism, we still produce material commodities. I admire Negri's previous work before Hardt, especially Marx Beyond Marx, because he offers a penetrating analysis into the concealment of the exploitation of surplus value by the money form, specifically the wage. I thought his call to build proletarian institutions very useful. Now, however, his "real subsumption" claim, that all time is capitalist time, has driven him towards a new idealism with Hardt that doesn't account for the continuing active conflict between the proletariat and capital. The Multitude is not an effective substitute for the proletariat, and Marx is still completely relevant in this regard.

My other main concern with Hardt and Negri is their heavy-handed emphasis on Deleuzian ontology. Anyone who does not philosophically agree with Deleuze, in particular his "vitalism" that I perceive to be an inheritance from Bergson and Nietzsche, will be wholly unconvinced by Hardt and Negri. There is too much piecemeal subsitution in Empire and Multitude, rather than continuing with Negri's careful Marxian analysis. I have read and enjoyed Deleuze, but I am wary of an unabashed Deleuzianism. In particular, Black and Third World scholars have been able to show that this Deleuzianism conceals, for example, the colonial topology of "Universal Being" (see Nelson Maldonado-Torres' critique).

In sum, before anyone reads Empire or Multitude, I highly recommend they look into Negri's earlier work, especially Marx Beyond Marx to witness the true potential of what has now become a watered-down, and dare I say, fashionable treatise.

[bretty]

I read Empire a couple years back, and Multitude twice. I only recently "got" the argument, after getting acquainted with the likes of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.

There are way too many incoherent summaries floating around, so I'll just give a brief one before moving on to my criticisms:

Hardt and Negri propose that in place of the old Empires such as Britain and France, we have moved to a deterritorialized Empire composed of a global sovereign (the US, the G8), aristocracy (the IMF, World Bank) and people (NGOs). This is really a theory of what has mistakenly been called "globalization," and it's obvious Hardt and Negri are yet another set of contributors to the topic of "neoliberalism" and in particular the social and economic upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s which has led to such things as IMF structural adjustment programmes and Harvey-esque "flexible accumulation."

Hardt and Negri are proposing that their darstellung, method of presentation, begins with Empire, but in fact their forschung, object of research, is the new subject of resistance, the Multitude. The Multitude is all the people all over the world resisting capitalist globalization, who despite their differences come together and produce a common consisting in immaterial knowledge. Hardt and Negri refer to this as "singularity-commonality." The common is in fact exploited by Empire, and Hardt and Negri refer to this as a regime of biopower (see Foucault), or the control over life itself. Hardt and Negri are unsatisfied with orthodox Marxist accounts of center-periphery and world systems analysis, and thus they give their own postmodern spin to the "diffusion of power" through various social capillaries.

I think many criticisms of Hardt and Negri have been quite lazy. For example, the claim that they were proven "wrong" when Bush invaded Iraq, signalling perhaps the return to good old-fashioned imperialism (versus Empire's imperial, ie. deterritorialized, nature). The US has obviously crash landed in the Middle East, as Immanuel Wallerstein put it. More importantly, this criticism does not deal at a significant theoretical level with Hardt and Negri's argument.

My concern with them really lies with their abandoment of the theory of surplus value. While the Multitude is being "exploited" for its immaterial knowledge, and certainly we ought to move beyond archaic industrial working-class unionism, we still produce material commodities. I admire Negri's previous work before Hardt, especially Marx Beyond Marx, because he offers a penetrating analysis into the concealment of the exploitation of surplus value by the money form, specifically the wage. I thought his call to build proletarian institutions very useful. Now, however, his "real subsumption" claim, that all time is capitalist time, has driven him towards a new idealism with Hardt that doesn't account for the continuing active conflict between the proletariat and capital. The Multitude is not an effective substitute for the proletariat, and Marx is still completely relevant in this regard.

My other main concern with Hardt and Negri is their heavy-handed emphasis on Deleuzian ontology. Anyone who does not philosophically agree with Deleuze, in particular his "vitalism" that I perceive to be an inheritance from Bergson and Nietzsche, will be wholly unconvinced by Hardt and Negri. There is too much piecemeal subsitution in Empire and Multitude, rather than continuing with Negri's careful Marxian analysis. I have read and enjoyed Deleuze, but I am wary of an unabashed Deleuzianism. In particular, Black and Third World scholars have been able to show that this Deleuzianism conceals, for example, the colonial topology of "Universal Being" (see Nelson Maldonado-Torres' critique).

In sum, before anyone reads Empire or Multitude, I highly recommend they look into Negri's earlier work, especially Marx Beyond Marx to witness the true potential of what has now become a watered-down, and dare I say, fashionable treatise.

Have you read Aihwa Ong's work "neoliberalism as exception"? It has a few critiques of their concept of multitude, particularly the fact that they consider the labour latitudes as consistent however cultural fragmentation and labour regime's often create different cultures of resistance. I liked your post by the way, good summary/insight.

[Trystan]

Where can I find the free copy?

[bretty]

Where can I find the free copy?

http://www.angelfire.com/cantina/negri/

[Jimmie Higgins]

I haven't read the book, but don't they argue that nation-states don't matter as much any more. If that's the case, then their argument seems to be outdated already considering the US's empire drive in the middle eat, increased competition between China and the US for influence in Africa.

With the economic crisis, my guess is that capitalist national competition increase and the capitalists will more and more need traditional nation-states to protect markets and resources. Competition will force capitalists to retreat behind the state to enact tariffs and protectionism and go to war to open new markets for the national capitalists.

[blake 3:17]

I did read Multitudes and thought it pretty nonsensical. Some of the basic questions are worth exploring -- the relationship of democratic republicanism to radical socialism -- but it was so ridden with basic errors of what actually happens in 21st century capitalism that I don't think it is any use.

[kalu]

Have you read Aihwa Ong's work "neoliberalism as exception"? It has a few critiques of their concept of multitude, particularly the fact that they consider the labour latitudes as consistent however cultural fragmentation and labour regime's often create different cultures of resistance. I liked your post by the way, good summary/insight.

I haven't, but I consider myself a budding anthropologist, so I really must get to her work. Thanks for the heads up, she's now definitely at the top of my list. I personally like Anthropology of Globalization because it reveals neoliberalism's contingent "emergence" in translocal spaces, rather than indulge in vague theoretical generalization. Thanks for the compliment.:)

[RevolverNo9]

It is important in so far as it does reflect real modes of thinking about strategy that do exist - more so in some parts of the world than others. However, as other have said, ultimately its arguments are a real retreat from many key points of revolutionary Marxism. The notion that the nation-state has been superceded by a near-metaphysical entity of 'Empire' is a dangerous one - as it woefully misplaces the targets that revolutionary strategy needs to approach. It's also quite clearly wrong: the state remains the crucial structure for reproducing capital and the social relations which arise from it. (Ellen Meiksins Wood's and Alex Callinicos' recent books are good on this point.) Strategically, we are really conceding something if we cease to target the state and instead attempt to confront this diffuse near-omnipresent power that 'Empire' supposedly represents.

The other side of their strategy - Hardt and Negri's proposal for post-modern capitalism's new revolutionary agent, the multitude - evacuates even more from Marxism's insights. Its argument is that, increasingly, the world's subalterns are engaged in work that involves 'non-material' products, such as communications and information, the internet etc... as a result, capitalists are not able to extract surplus from these people as they are from the product of traditional, proletarian labour. This gives rise to a diverse, transnational, borderless 'multitude' of potentially revolutionary agents, free from traditional capitalism's exploitation and able to tease open the cracks in Empire's power.

Yet the starting point here need only prevail if one reproduces the idealism that in the first place separates so-called 'immaterial labour' from material labour. It's a fundamental insight of Marxism that such separations are false, and that all human interraction with the world constitutes labour - as it transforms the world around you and other people living in the world. This is the same for mental labour as it is for material labour. As a result revolutionaries must continue to assert the reality of continued capitalist exploitation. The working-class are still the key agent of revolutionary change.

Against the ideas suggested by Hardt and Negri, I would also argue that the debate highlights the need to pose the question of state power, and to create the revolutionary forms of organisation required for the working-class to challenge this power, as it is concentrated in the states that still protect reproduce capitalism.

[YSR]

Generally, I agree with Kalu, although I haven't done all the background reading that he has (notably I've never cracked open Deleuze, which makes me the uncool kid at all the parties).

The work of many of the operaist/Italian workerist thinkers since the 1970s has generally devolved as they became more embedded in academia and Negri is no exception. I worked my way through most of Empire and I agree 100% with Kalu: he's saying what he said thirty years ago, except less clearly and much less radically. I was introduced to operaismo before I encountered post-operaismo, so for a while Bifo, Bologna and Negri were my intellectual superheroes. But watching their trajectories today is just depressing. Empire isn't worth the effort, in my mind, when better texts by Negri and his buddies exist.

[Manzil]

I think Hardt and Negri use too many words to say too little.

Found 'Empire' a distraction, but nothing new or useful.

[JimmyJazz]

Hardt and Negri are a joke, but here's a comparable book that seems not to be:

Low-Wage Capitalism (http://www.amazon.com/Low-Wage-Capitalism-Colossus-Feet-Clay/dp/0895671514/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254604490&sr=1-1)



I read Empire a couple years back, and Multitude twice. I only recently "got" the argument, after getting acquainted with the likes of Michel Foucault

I think this says how worthless Hardt and Negri are better than I ever could, thank you.

[spiltteeth]

What I got out of Empire : a head-ache and the insight, which is important, that globalization need not be a bad thing for Leftist revolution.

[ellipsis]

and dare I say, fashionable treatise.

I have heard it described as one of those books that everybody talks about and cites its arguments, but nobody has actually read. Multitude was definately en mode among political science/political philosophy circles when I was in university.

[Искра]

I read the book and I agree with the fact that they haven't say anything new, they haven't offered any kind of solution, their language is for people with philosophy PhD aka. intellectual elites.
I had this as collage asaigment. My professor claimed that this is "Communist Manifesto of 21st century". When he asked me why I'm not enthusiastic after reading this I told him: This is philosophical piece of shit. This can't be Communist Manifesto of 21st century. No one can understand this.

[JimmyJazz]

Heh. You can count on would-be radical professors to want to replace the Communist Manifesto with something more abstract and less threatening. Plus all that strange talk about "workers" doesn't really connect with them too well.

[YKTMX]

Leaving aside the question of the politics of 'Empire' for the moment, I don't really accept this charge of obscurantism that some posters have been levelling.

I mean, the book is full of terms ("immanence", "subjectivities" etc) that it would require some grounding in continental political theory and philosophy to understand, but I don't think this means that the book is confrontationally difficult. The prose is, I find, fairly straightforward for the most part.

To give a comparison, you could read other "critical theorists" - Spivak comes to mind - and not have a clue, at some points, what is going on, even though the conceptual framework is similar to Hardt and Negri's.

I have to say, though: on my first reading of, my thought was that it was a book written by cosmopolitan intellectuals, for cosmopolitan intellectuals about cosmopolitan intellctuals.

There's more to it than that, I'm sure, however.

[Parker]

The final volume in the trilogy - Commonwealth - is just out. It has just been reviewed in the Wall Street Journal.

[Unfortunately I cannot post the link to either the book (it's on Googlebooks) or the WSJ article as I haven't yet made 25 posts ...]

[Die Neue Zeit]

I read the book and I agree with the fact that they haven't say anything new, they haven't offered any kind of solution, their language is for people with philosophy PhD aka. intellectual elites.
I had this as collage asaigment. My professor claimed that this is "Communist Manifesto of 21st century". When he asked me why I'm not enthusiastic after reading this I told him: This is philosophical piece of shit. This can't be Communist Manifesto of 21st century. No one can understand this.

Well, they just wrote Commonwealth to cap off their trilogy of books:

http://www.amazon.com/Commonwealth-Michael-Hardt/dp/0674035119

A blog review from a financial analyst can be found here:

http://prudentinvestor.blogspot.com/2009/10/todays-highlight-wsj-says-marx-is-back.html

[kalu]

Leaving aside the question of the politics of 'Empire' for the moment, I don't really accept this charge of obscurantism that some posters have been levelling.

I mean, the book is full of terms ("immanence", "subjectivities" etc) that it would require some grounding in continental political theory and philosophy to understand, but I don't think this means that the book is confrontationally difficult. The prose is, I find, fairly straightforward for the most part.

To give a comparison, you could read other "critical theorists" - Spivak comes to mind - and not have a clue, at some points, what is going on, even though the conceptual framework is similar to Hardt and Negri's.

I have to say, though: on my first reading of, my thought was that it was a book written by cosmopolitan intellectuals, for cosmopolitan intellectuals about cosmopolitan intellctuals.

There's more to it than that, I'm sure, however.

True, Hardt and Negri are actually quite clear, with even just a cursory understanding of continental philosophy. And technical terms DO NOT automatically equal needless jargon (I don't know where people get this idea). Some people seem to have been misreading me. If they actually read my review, for example, they'd see that I think there are serious ideas in Empire and Multitude, though better worked out in Negri's earlier work.

I must firmly disagree, however, with your Spivak example, YKTMX; her conceptual framework is entirely different from Hardt and Negri's. She critiques Foucault and Deleuze in favor of Derrida and Marx. Her most famous work (I don't know others), "Can the Subaltern Speak?" appears terrifying because of its breadth and style, but it really contains one of the most important critiques of western philosophy of the last century. I have read and understood Spivak, after careful study of continental philosophy, and I can say that she does not use jargon needlessly. The prose is tightly wound, and the ideas really are there. I can post more specifically about the ideas, if you or anyone else so wishes, but that might also be for another topic.