Toni Negri was the most celebrated intellectual of Italy’s “ultra-left” in the 1970s. He was jailed in 1979 for “armed insurrection against the powers of the State”; won freedom in 1983 by getting elected to Parliament; fled to France in 1983; and has been back in jail, in Italy, since 1997.
His new book, Empire written with an American academic, Michael Hardt, analyses the world of “globalisation”. They see it as all-encompassing, oppressive, but containing potentials for liberation.
“The strategy of local resistance misidentifies and thus masks the enemy. We are by no means opposed to the globalisation relationships as such… The enemy, rather, is a specific regime of global relations that we call Empire. More important, this strategy of defending the local is damaging because it obscures and even negates the real alternatives and the potentials for liberation that exist within Empire. We should be done once and for all with the search for an outside, a standpoint that imagines a purity for our politics… The multitude, in its will to be-against and its desire for liberation, must push through Empire to come out the other side.”
But the primary impression I am left with upon reading Empire is that Marxists are liable to forget that there are processes of legitimation of capitalist society necessary to reinforce its juridical rule, because Marxists already accept that capitalism (and so its rule) is self-perpetuating in the very mode of production itself.
Negri and Hardt subject this forgetfulness to a critical examination and find that the global legitimation of domination is very different today from that which Lenin found when he produced his theory of imperialism. What defines Empire is not US rule per se but the propagation of imperial, not imperialist, concerns.
Processes of justification for intervention make the popular demands for peacekeeping forces to “do something” in the hot-spots look like a voluntary basis for popular assent to bourgeois hegemonic rule
As evidence for this the authors cite the moral rights of intervention that are generated when NGOs and global peace-keeping institutions work hand-in-glove with one another to constitute the moral impetus for a global police force represented in organisations like NATO.
The liberal pluralist’s wet dream does what Marxists always thought it did: better protect capitalism.
And so there are some useful things in this book for us to take note of. For example, an explanation of the recent US expeditions in the Balkans as a patent plunder of material resources for the machine of imperialism has and does cover for some gross remnants in the left that repeatedly fail to distinguish between the transparent cases of securing expanding markets, and those in which the domination serves long-term strategic interests.
Nevertheless, whether that reinforcement of strategic interests is but a delayed form of increasing proletarianisation is unclear in the book.
And that is the other major premise of Empire. Globalisation, according to Negri and Hardt, cannot be characterised along the orthodox trajectory as the highest “stage of imperialism”. Rather, it must be defined as a qualitatively new form of capitalist domination.
The political implications of Empire are ambiguous. The resistance to Empire by “the multitude” when that “multitude” has been contrasted to “the people” earlier in the book only by its “deterritorialising power” — that is, the impossibility of old-fashioned nationalism — [is unclear] especially considering the fact that the authors think that globalisation “should not be understood in terms of cultural, political or economic homogenisation. Globalisation, like localisation, should be understood instead as a regime of the production of identity and difference, or really of homogenisation and heterogenisation (p.45). Does not this regime fundamentally weaken these new subjectivities, sought after as points of resistance by the authors, against the terror? They grant this possibility themselves.
There are other things, I think, that must also be rejected. Negri and Hardt attempt to support their theory of Empire with an utterly superficial commentary on the arguments between Lenin and Luxemburg and Hilferding. This particular section of the book will be infuriating to most Marxists.
Nevertheless, the authors’ discussion of the relationship between nationalism and populism is particularly insightful and worth reading. Further, the "crisis of modernity" that many philosophers rely on as argument against Marxism and which is usually construed as the "death" of any overarching authoritative reference - no God, no Nature, no Communist Party, no History - is refreshingly absent here. Negri's and Hardt's Marxism does not collapse into a heap in the face of a shrill announcement of so many funerals. Bio-political sovereignty is the substitute edifice of modernity, still alive and voracious as ever.
