Customer Reviews

Empire

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

Perhaps it's a bit late to weigh in on Empire, but so many of the posted reviews strike me as so silly that I couldn't resist: most simply denounce or praise the authors for being "Marxist" or complain about the obscurantist writing. As for the first approach: who cares one way or another? Obviously Hardt and Negri aren't just repeating what Marx said, and why should they? (On the other hand, it's ridiculous to pretend that someone could analyze contemporary capitalism without referring to Marx.) Anyway, there is no general, systematic "framework" called Marxism, that you could accept or reject wholesale. Marx himself wasn't a Marxist, as everyone knows!

As for the writing, I've been surprised by how frequently people attack its academicism: anyone familiar with Negri's previous work can tell that he's dumbed down the arguments a fair amount, which has sometimes deprived them of some of their subtlety and rigor. It's a book of political philosophy, not the latest pot-boiler from your average journalist. I don't think it's elitist to ask the general public to grapple with a difficult work--I'm sure most are quite capable of it!

As for Empire itself: I think Negri has made a major misstep. The basic argument is simple (another reason I don't see its intellectualism--everyone has at least gotten the major point). Negri has made himself look pretty foolish coming out with a book in 2000 claiming that traditional imperialism is dead (the subsequent policies of George II's administration have forced Hardt and Negri to more or less admit they got it wrong in recent interviews). He seems to have gotten taken in by the liberal/social-democratic rhetoric of the 90s, which envisioned a super-state providing global capitalism with an international law. This was never anything but a reformist utopia, which projected a welfare-state compromise at the global level--after 20 years of Reagan-Thatcherism and neoliberalism at the national level!

Theoretically, then, Negri is just expanding on his old thesis of "real subsumption" (yes, the term is Marx's but Negri has elabrated a quite original interpretation), sprucing it up with a new theory of sovereignty. The claim--surrounded by so many qualifications and caveats that Hardt and Negri clearly don't really buy the argument themselves and are hedging their bets--is that the nation-state, and hence imperialism in its old sense are rapidly declining, being replaced by an imperial sovereignty that is conceptually foggy and simply doesn't reflect empirical historical tendencies. The "nation-state" as an abstraction is as strong as ever--it's everywhere! Some actually existing nation-states are much stronger than others, however--in other words, the U.S., Western Europe, Japan, perhaps China and Russia, are still potentially (and in the case of the U.S. actually) imperialist powers. They will never coordinate themselves into a regulated global order, and even if they did, the global South would never accept such an order.

Negri used to argue back in the 80s that the form of sovereignty most appropriate to the era of real subsumption was the nuclear state, not some international social democracy. It seems to me he should have stuck with this line--if anything it's more true than ever today. The basic political unit is still the state, and there isn't a state out there that doesn't ardently desire some nukes! (By the way, as far as I can tell Hardt's main contribution to Empire is to bring in discussions of the "postmodernism" and "post-colonial" theory that is so popular in certain academic circles. An almost total waste of time.)

Overall, Empire is still fascinating in its suggestiveness and its grand syntheses. Even if you disagree with the argument, it is absorbing and thought-provoking reading.

"Empire", which is now going on five years, attempts in its atmospheric prose to elucidate a totalizing world view of the future of the global economy. What emerges is an optimistic, incurably Hegelian proposition that the current globalization of economics and society, despite its oppressive characteristics, are a necessary (and inevitable) stage of modern capitalist development which must exist in order to bring about the mobilization of the "multitude." Hardt and Negri's boundless faith in the eventual triumph of the "multitude" (i.e. proletariat) is definitively neo-Marxist and utopian. Hardt and Negri further view the struggle as cutting across culture, class, race, and nationality, and that it must be seen as as multi-disciplinary liberation.

Given today's bleak political environment dominated by a conservative, evangelical and thoroughly warlike United States, and a progressive dialogue principally limited to finding the faults of the power structure rather than offering any coherent alternative structures of political economy, I grasped "Empire's" cheery exposition of globalism as a necessary, if evil, transition to a utopian state like a drowning man to a raft.

The problem - or a problem - with "Empire" is that it is like the auntie's Christmas fruitcake, likely to sit on one's shelf, only partly eaten, glowering sullenly until finally stashed away. If I still taught political science, I would torture my students with this book, much as I was tortured with Althusser and Foucault, the bread and butter of 1960s academic Marxists. Marxism remains a very valuable tool of historical criticism, as evidenced by such present-day historians as Eric Hobsbawm and Howard Zinn. As a predictive tool of historical development, and as a societal endpoint, it requires tremendous and unqualified leaps of faith and adaptations which are hard to relate to reality. When pressed to explain what the "liberated multitude" would look like, it is anyone's guess. If this is the anti-globalist Bible, as one reviewer so expressively states, there better be a thick codex to go with it.

There are plenty of good observations in "Empire" of the development of globalism and the erosion of nation-state dichotomies, but this is not particularly revolutionary. In fact, what is surprising is Hardt and Negri's faithfulness to conventional Marxist conversations regarding the future of the "proletariat" and the "working class." Likewise, they fall into the trap of characterizing the national liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s as some sort of organic global challenge to capitalist economies, when in fact, wars such as Algeria, Angola and Vietnam were anti-colonial and distinctly nationalist. Given the chance, political autonomy ranked far higher to these emerging states than faithfulness to socialist equity. Indeed, unless one has lived as an academic hermit or (maybe this is a cheap shot at Negri) in a prison cell, capitalist corporatism is as triumphant as it has ever been.

"Empire's" analytical flaws are not hard to uncover. I had to wince at points where Negri points to the "Los Angeles uprising" (the spasm of a riot following the acquittal of Rodney King's police assaulters) as a historical event on a par with the liberation of South Africa, or opportunistically observing that rap music is the emerging voice of the liberated "multitude" (obviously Negri has not seen Spike Lee's "Bamboozled."). Unlike the late Edward Said who was unparalleled at interweaving culture and political economy with uncanny precision ("Orientalism", "The Culture of Imperialism"), Hardt and Negri mostly engage in trivialities.

The opacity of most of the prose in "Empire" is, unfortunately, endemic to European neo-Marxist theory after the 1970s. What appears on first reading as precise diction is actually quite imprecise, yielding any number of interpretations which can be shaped to fit evidentiary data or events (to the extent such data exists). Paragraphs typically start with a declarative statement introducing a "paradigm" but then we are told that the reality is "less clear", subject to "disarticulation" or complex "matrices." From page 319:

"In Empire, as indeed was also the case in modern and ancient regimes, the constitution itself is a site of struggle, but today the nature of that site and that struggle is by no means clear. The general outlines of today's imperial constitution can be conceived in the form of a rhizomatic and universal communication network in which relations are established to and from all its points or nodes. Such a network seems paradoxically to be at once completely open and completely closed to struggle and intervention." Say what? I thought asparagus was a rhizome. As good Marxist scholastics, Negri and Hardt are consummate name droppers, which frequent references propel the footnotes and the narrative, while reducing to tears the average reader whose Foucault is still in the boxes of books left over from grad school. The frequent references to authors such as Delenze and Habermas are of little value to readers who do not have their shelves crammed full of such works, let alone actually read them. Each such reference, of course, is a meaningful shorthand for a cascade of complex ideas which becomes immediately lost to the uninitiated.

In the final analysis, though, "Empire", while an entertaining utopian epic, is topically irrelevant. Since the end of the Cold War, the upward struggles of the "multitude" have been overshadowed by the epic battle for resource domination (oil) in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. After 2001, this struggle in turn has been exacerbated by the medievalist religious conflict between Wahabist Islam and Puritan America. In no way did (or could) Hardt and Negri foresee the grim, gray "forever war" now undertaken by the United States, perverting the wartime command economy created over a half-century ago by Roosevelt into a mechanism to channel untold revenue to a select circle of military-industrial corporations. This, not Negri's, is the real story of Empire.

This dense and philosophically avant-garde tome is nonetheless passionate and compulsively readable, I found that I could not put it down after I picked it up. Even more remarkable is the facility with which Negri and Hardt facilitate both the history of the west and our contemporary postmodern terrain. Their central thesis is that the form of sovereignity that has characterized modernity is ending and that that there is a new form of sovereignity forming which they term 'Empire'. In doing this they examine Machiavelli, Spinoza, the founders of the U.S. political system, Marx, Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Bill Gates and many others in creative blend of materialism, history, radical politics and philosophy. The criticisms of post-structuralist and postcolonial theory are especially timely. If you are tired of coventional liberal politics try this book headlined by Italy's most famous living philosopher and political prisoner - Toni Negri.

Is this book still relevant? Many will argue that the current
US neoconservative rampage disproves Hardt and Negri's "Empire" thesis. I disagree with that. First of all, never did H&N posit that imperialism, nationalism, patriotism had died on, say, June 5th, 1999. They did argue that the tendancy was for capitalism to reorganize itself into Empire-a dectralized globalized capitalist network that would diminish borders in such a way as to allow the smooth flow of capital globally.

So we should ask ourselves if we are indeed returning to the age of "imperialism" or proceeeding toward "Empire". I would argue
that the current US neo-conservative policy is an attempt to return to imperialism, however, I believe that it is an aberration, an irregular moment in the unfolding of Empire. In imperialism, capital is organized around capitalists according to nation-states. And so you would have German capitalists, vying against French capitalists, etc. But the present day formation of capital is less and less organized around national groups as it is around transnational groups.

This is not to say that there do not still exist national formations of capital (after all, we saw French captialist interests in Iraq being challenged by big oil capitalists from the US)...it is to say that global capital formations are the growing tendancy and will win out over time. So, what we are witnessing right now is very complex. We can not expect that imperialism ends one day and Empire starts the next...they will coexist for some time to come.

And what about the revolutionary subject that will counter Empire? H&N call those forces, the multitudes. The notion of multitudes replaces the classical marxist notion of proleterian (in which the industrial factory worker was seen as the most revolutionary class). the multitudes includes the industrial proleteriat but it does not assign it the prominent role it once had in classical marxism. The term multitudes, as the name suggests, describes the various groups , each with its varying "desires", that counter global capitalism. Instead of a dialectical conflict betwee an proleteriat led by a so-called vanguard organization against the capitalist class, H&N project the multitudes as being composed of various groups developing life according to the diversity of their needs. This is in stark contrast to the undemocratic Vanguard Party which is "delegated" power and which decides the strategies, values and lifestyles for all that fall under its umbrella .

One problem is that Negri seems to have an almost romantic notion of the multitudes; this echos some of the naive concepts earlier marxism held about the proleteriat. Whenever Negri writes about
the multitudes, he speaks as if they were these pure revolutionary subjects. But that is not true. The multitudes
can be racist, religiously fanatic and homophobic. Given this, how can we realistically consider a stateless society. As many coming from the autonomist tradition, Hardt & Negri refuse to postulate what a future post-capitalist world might look like.The reason given for this is democratically inspired: a future world would be made up of multifarious experiments that people developed out of their being, not dictated by the vision of a vanguard party or a handful of intellectuals.

However H&N do put forward a few demands that might guide the anti-global-capital movement: (1) No borders and (2) a universal
income. It is clear that in the global economy the global multitude will need to find ways to unite. The slogan, "Workers of the world unite" can no longer be a pleasant aphorism; it is a necessity. Much chauvinism will be stirred up and nationalism will still emerge and pit workers from one country against another. However, if we suceed in uniting transnationally, not allowing capital any respite in any corner of the globe, then we can win. This is the good news, coupled with deep analysis, that Hardt and Negri bring to us in "Empire".

Before I begin: 1) I laugh at every reactionary ideologue who claims to be objective, demcocratic, humane, etc. Please go somewhere else with your blather. 2) the Italian government framed Negri...On to Empire.

Good: Some very interesting insights into how the world is changing and how transnational institutions are really developing into more than mere window dressing. The idea of 'multitude' certainly opens things up a bit and frankly its pretty slick as a catchword.

Bad: I actually think that, theoretically, Negri and Hardt are retrograde. Hard to get into it here without jargon, so I apologize in advance. I feel that Negri recapitulates the crude neo-Stalinism of Althusser and Balibar. Negri has been moving away from his roots in Italian autonomist Marxism for almost two decades. Whatever they are doing, it really isn't related to Marx, but rather a radical redressing of currently fashionable bourgeois ideology (post-structuralism and a revamped Spinozism, basically) which breaks fundamentally with Marx's critique of capital and which will, in the end, drive people away from Marx.

Negri and Hardt appeal to young radical intellectuals much as Althusser did in the 1960's and 1970's, and it will be just as poisonous. From the rejuvenation of structuralism, functionalism, and politicism, they run to the praise of the Militant (in place of Althusser's Party) as the creative force of revolution, against an inert, suicidal mass. The elitism is appalling, as is the incipient Leninism.

Simon Clarke's work in the book "One Dimensional Marxism", and his essays on Nicos Poulantzas in issues 2 and 5 of Capital and Class make a good starting critique. Follow it up with the hard to find essay "Beyond Autonomy and Perversion" by Werner Bonefeld and "From Capitalist Crisis to Proletarian Slavery" by George Caffentzis. This provides the beginning of a thorough critique.

Whichever way you look at it, however, this book has to be dealt with seriously and there is really nothing else which attempts a serious theorization of globalization outside of bourgeois social theory. I gave it four stars for provocation.

Negri & Hardt say the world is in the process of becoming One World (Empire), an integrated capitalist system with a legal/governmental level. As a tendency this is hardly controversial, as witnessed by the fierce protests against it that have erupted especially since "The Battle of Seattle" of late 1999. What makes this book more futuristic speculation than hard-headed reporting is 1) the authors' elaborated theory of this new world, and 2) their unsubstantiated assertion that it has already arrived.

Before addressing the people who really ought to read EMPIRE, a few words to those who should not:

1) CONSERVATIVES -- If you think we live in the best of all possible worlds and that the equations of neoclassical economics are actually true (a fallacy of misplaced concreteness), first you should go read Voltaire's Candide and meet Dr. Pangloss, and then you should go live for a year in someplace like Afghanistan or India, in poverty and/or under U.S. bombs. You'll get nothing from this book until you have a radical epiphany.

2) ARMCHAIR POSTMODERNISTS -- I know you have probably already read this and are on to some newer fad now, but if not, don't bother. Rereading Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus will be much more exciting. Yeah, H&N use Foucault and "biopower," but it doesn't add anything crucial to their argument.

3) THOSE FEW PEOPLE KNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT RECENT DEBATES IN MARXISM -- Yes, I know, you're likely to have read it too, to see what the fuss was about. But if not, it's not the most profound of recent attempts to update Karl. (Take a look at Moishe Postone's Time, Labor, and Social Domination.) If you're interested in Negri, you're better off reading The Politics of Subversion, and watch for his lynchpin argument about the real subsumption of value -- I think he's all wrong, and it reveals his Eurocentric viewpoint.

So who SHOULD read this book? Young anti-globalization activists and anyone else who is burning with desire not only to understand the world, but to understand it so that they can more effectively CHANGE it, as the Old Moor advocated (in his 11th Thesis on Fuerbach, if you want to look it up). It's not the gospel, in fact I think it's seriously wrong-headed in many ways, but it is a serious attempt to grapple with what is changing and how, and is intended as a tool for activists. It is packed with useful information on the history of capitalism, and places assessments of the 20th century in the longer view since its complex origins -- like Marx, H&N see the ongoing dialectical development of capital as progressive, and this partly accounts for the book's positive reception in places like the New York Times.

EMPIRE is relentlessly optimistic in its radical outlook, in the faith that it is "the multitude," not the elites, that has the power to reshape the world. Use it!

"Empire" is an ambitious book. Readers who approach this work with an open mind will be rewarded with numerous insights and a keener understanding of the world in which we live.

Reading the book is like being invited to listen to a dialogue between two great thinkers. One can sense the paragraphs that may have been written by the philosopher Michael Hardt from among those by the political scientist Antonio Negri. You are fascinated by the manner in which the exchange of ideas seems to create a kind of intellectual synergy, which in turn leads us to deeper and more penetrating analyses of the subject matter. It would be interesting to learn how the authors communicated with each other (Hardt is in the U.S. and Negri was in prison in Italy) to achieve this remarkable feat.

The book is divided into four sections. It may be helpful to look at each individually to better undestand why opinions about this book seem to vary so widely.

The first section on "Political Constitution" disscuses the characteristics of the empire dominating our postmodern world. The authors discuss the declining power of nation states and the increasing power of multinational corporations along with the institutions that regulate them (such as the IMF, UN, WTO etc.). The authors contend that the requirements of capital have created juridical norms that have literally enveloped all regions of the world, meaning that there is no longer an "outside" to the globalized capitalist regime.

Importantly, the authors draw on Michel Foucault's theories to describe the transformation from the "disciplinary society" in the imperialist era to the "society of control" in the current era of globalization. The term "biopower" is used to describe how the empire's values have become internalized by the multitude, allowing control to be exercised through the self-regulating actions of individuals participating in the market economy. On the other hand, Hardt and Negri contend that biopower may hold the key to the multitude's liberation from capitalism, an idea that is introduced here but is more fully developed out later in the book.

Section two on "Passages of Sovereignty" traces the rise of modernity and the state. This section has seven chapters and could almost be regarded as an excellent book-within-the-book. The topics discussed in this section include the emergence of the state and its relationship with the Enlightenment; the state's role in mobilizing citizens for capitalist production and war; the importance of slave labor to capitalism in Europe and the New World; and much more.

Hardt and Negri's concept of "network power" that is embedded within the U.S. constitution was particularly interesting. The authors contend that by locating power within the productive capacity of the citizens, the U.S. is uniquely capable of projecting capitalist power world-wide. However, they contend that this power is "imperial" (but not "imperialist") in that it primarily serves the interests of capital but not the state and its citizens. While some may take issue with the authors on this point, I believe that the prevalence of corporate tax scams, oil wars, trade agreements with non-existant labor standards and the like suggests that the authors may be right.

The third section is titled "Passages of Production". This is another substantive section containing six chapters that could almost be read as an independent work. Here, the authors draw heavily on Marx to discuss how society has responded to changing economic conditions. I found these chapters to be extremely well-written, offering concise and powerful analyses that helped me gain a new level of understanding.

A few of the topics discussed include the importance of the New Deal in resolving the "crisis of imperialism" manifested by the Great Depression and intra-capitalist war; the socio-political dynamics that led to postcolonial resistance in Vietnam and elsewhere; the emergence of world markets; and more.

Central to the analysis is a discussion of the enormous cultural changes in the 1960s. The authors state that the desire for personal liberation and freedom from the Fordist "factory-society" led to a profound restructuring of the "social mode of production". Capital responded to the crisis by privileging information technology and implementing more flexible, decentralized and inclusive forms of management. However, the Soviet Union's inability to abandon the disciplinary regime and its rigid, centralized management structure meant that it could not successfully make this transition.

Hardt and Negri's description of the postmodern world seems familiar. Most people have economic power and productive freedom but limited political power; the media produces entertaining "spectacle" but also perpetuates "superstitution" and inculcates "fear" of poverty; pockets of wealth have appeared in poor countries but the poor are increasingly visible in wealthy nations; and so on. While much of this has been stated elsewhere, the author's ability to tie these symptoms of globalization to their root causes is masterful and makes for compelling reading.

Section four is about the "Decline and Fall of Empire". In the spirit of Marx, Hardt and Negri hope to show how the times we live in may be different from past eras and hold the potential for revolutionary change. While I think that the case was convincingly made that the empire as the authors have defined it is indeed a new phenomenon, I was not convinced that the evolution to a society that Saint Francis of Assisi might endorse will necessarilly follow.

The authors return to the concept of biopower -- which might also be understood as their updated version of Marx's concept of class consciousness -- to make their case. They believe that the unprecendented mixing of people and ideas is enabling an "ontological human dimension" of biopower that is naturally people-centered, peaceful, and loving. Biopower will eventually realize its material existence when people coopt the means of production (especially information technology) and "cast off" the the violent apparatus of empire in favor of brotherhood, or a state of non-government. In the end, Hardt and Negri have imagined a world that slightly resembles a John Lennon song: a world with no countries and with income and resources available to all.

Whether one agrees with the authors' beautiful vision of the future, I think that this book easily deserves a 5 star rating. With hundreds of pages packed with outstanding research and an uncanny ability to synthesize a variety of sources into an unique vision, this book will no doubt stimulate thinking people for many years to come.

I've always been a big fan of Negri and the Italian autonomists, but I feel that Empire seriously sidetracks radicalism. For one thing, the political philosophy represented in this book is a bad combination of Foucault and--in my opinion--misappropriations of Deleuze and Guattari. (Yes, I know that Negri and Guattari worked together on numerous projects--and i loved "Communists Like Us"--but this doesn't excuse the hack-job Negri and Hardt have done to Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy.) The use of postmodern philosophy makes the overall theory of "Empire" retrograde and even seriously damages Negri's early ideas of "the socialized worker", which he has merely updated, and mutated, in this book.

Furthermore, Hardt and Negri's assertion that "Imperialism" has been replaced by "Empire" is semantic garbage. There is no center to Capitalism anymore? Come on!! Anyone with any sense needs only to read the newspaper to realize that Capitalism does indeed have a center--America--and, thus, Imperialism is still alive and well. How can Hardt and Negri explain away Desert Storm, or the Nato strike on Yugoslavia, or Bush's current crusade for that matter?

With this being said I still think "Empire" has a few intriguing concepts, one being that the revolutionary icon of Lenin needs to be exchanged for something like a St. Francis of Asisi. Of course this drives all the Leninists crazy and I'm sure the authors put this in just to reveal the rabid dogmatism of orthodox Socialists. I said "intriguing" but that doesn't mean that St. Francis--who took vows of poverty while still tying himself to the Catholic hegemony--is really a "revolutionary" figure...

Actually, most of the valid points of "Empire"--which you can find when you plough through the weighty over-philosophizing--have already been said in earlier works by Negri and, better yet, in "Cyber-Marx" by Nick Dyer-Witheford. In fact I would recommend "Cyber-Marx" instead of "Empire"; Dyer-Witheford not only updates and reinvents Negri's autonomist position, but he does a far better--and more accurate--job of describing the realities of advanced Capitalism.

Since Empire is not written for a popular audience, casual readers should avoid it like the plague. There are few concessions to the reader, even experienced ones.The verbiage is dense, some key concepts remain murky, and few examples are given. However, if you've some background in history of ideas including postmodernism, some time on your hands, and a curiosity about what the future may hold, then you may want to give the book a try. Frankly, I would read some parts more as science fiction than as valuable guide, but it does have its moments.

The authors are neo-Marxists with a heavy emphasis on the `neo'. Because by the time their postmodern approach finishes with Marx, he's about as recognizable as a shredded medical school cadaver. That's not to say the old boy couldn't use a face lift, but this is radical surgery that eliminates the patient by removing the vital organs. Tossed into the formaldehyde is all semblance of political economy. Postmodernism has little time for anything dealing with measurables that pretend to a life beyond what we come to give them. So goodbye to M-C-M', relative surplus value, and all those other key formulations that make the Marxian paradigm powerful and scientifically appealing. Goodbye too to economic classes, though they may be granted some vague afterlife in what there is of Empire's sociology. Historical Materialism?- just another useless organ, although the authors press their own version of a global market with a relentless determinism that would do the Second Internationale proud. Needless to say, the book's least persuasive parts are those attempting to hang on to the aura at the same time the body of Marx is discarded.

Instead of laying bare capital's laws of motion or riffs on that worthy enterprise, we get extrapolations of current trends. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, except that the level of abstraction from Hardt and Negri is so extreme that at times we enter the banished realm of metaphysics where only ideas count. The paradigm here is the internet and cyberspace. Like these two postmodern icons, Empire is everywhere and nowhere, seemingly beyond any and all paticulars, omnipresent like a dark god in the ether. Similarly, the multitude (ordinary people) are stripped of determining content, becoming more like a bare idea than a true category. Such results could only be reached by abstracting out all that is historical, contextual, and conflictual from the world around us. It's like waking up in a dim room with a sinister presence hovering and not knowing how you got there. Too many of the book's other visionary results are arrived at in similarly ethereal fashion. And though the authors want to avoid an Empire of undue seamlessness by factoring in the idea of hierarchy, the result is again a bare semblance. In short, Empire is emptied of too much that is remotely particular or material in content.

More surprising is a glaring absence of concern with environmental issues. Marx had an excuse since he was pre-Rachel Carson. Hardt and Negri do not. They at least owe the reader an explanation of why no mention is made of this planet-threatening menace and its ties to profit-driven capital. Perhaps it is their assumption that Empire can finesse the conflict between profits and nature as easily as easily it digests national liberation and class struggles. However, no social theory, Marxist or not, can any longer afford not dealing with green issues as a major topic of concern. Nor can a work present itself as a paradigm for the new millenium minus this awareness. For such an egregious omission, there is simply no excuse.

On the other hand, there are solid parts to the book. Part 2, "Passages to Sovereignty", presents an historical analysis of sovereignty that is both novel and stimulating, and should appeal to those with an interest in political science. The discussion here is extremely insightful, shedding light on representative government in the First World and national liberation movements in the Third. There are other useful snippets scattered throughout, and the authors are to be commended for grappling with the contours of a post cold-war world. Nevertheless, the eclectic blending of Marx and postmodernism is both forced and unproductive, while a continuing deference to the 19th century revolutionary suggests there is far less to the "post" in post-modernism than the authors or their many acolytes intend.

General Summary

In Empire political theorists Hardt and Negri describe a new form of global sovereignty called Empire. Unlike the modernist era which privileged the nation-state as the primary site of social organization and command, Empire is distinctly postmodern and ascribes to no central source of power. In replace of central power, rallied around the nation-state, sovereignty has evolved into a diffuse network of decentered nodal points. These nodal points include multinational corporations, nation-states, NGOs, and supranational institutions, all of which simultaneously vie for political and capitalistic hegemony. Empire's evolving political logic, while frightening to the extent that it attempts to reproduce global hierarchy, is, according to Hardt and Negri, a response to a crisis in capitalism that emerged sometime after 1968. While Empire is indicative of a new global order, then, Hardt and Negri view it as "better than the forms of society and modes of production that came before it" (43). Whereas previous historical epochs relied on repressive measures such as the Fordist assembly line to regulate subjectivity and discipline behavior, Empire's modes of subjectification are increasingly decentered and fragmented. This weakness in empire- a shift corresponding with the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism- is ultimately what can allow for the multitude, the locus of all production in late capitalist society, to "enter the terrain of Empire and confront their homogenizing and heterogenizing flows in all their complexity" (46). Hardt and Negri's work, as a result, reads as the "Communist Manifesto" of the 21st century; it takes Marx and Engel's theory of historical materialism and situates it in the radically different contours of late capitalist society.

Key concepts

Disciplinary societies
Hardt and Negri argue that the modernist era was characterized by a typology of social reproduction called disciplinary societies. In disciplinary societies "social command is constructed through a diffuse network of dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and productive practices" (p. 23). In disciplinary societies, then, power is consolidated in particular material localities such as the factory line, the prison, the school, and the psychiatric ward. This structuralist epistemology-- which views a transcendent outside as subjectifying an immanent inside-- corresponds with the model of ideology theorized by Marx and Engels.
In Marxist theory the bourgeois is believed to be coeval with the interests of capitalism. As a result, it uses this mode of production to discipline and reproduce the immanent productive forces of the proletariat. In late capitalism, however, as Hardt and Negri argue, immanence is no longer limited to the category of the proletariat. In the era Empire, a multiplicity of subject positions have all become immanent to capitalism, a consequence that derives from the emergence of immaterial labor and the global division of labor. This new terrain of immanence, then, requires a new conceptual framework, and for this Hardt and Negri turn to the concepts of control societies and biopolitical production.


Control societies
Societies of control are peculiar to postmodernity and coincide with the transition from capital's formal subsumption of labor to its real subsumption of labor. In this stage of capitalist production- a shift brought about by the multitude- "mechanisms of command become ever more `democratic,' ever more immanent to the social field" (23). In contrast to disciplinary societies, societies of control function immanently. They do not require any disciplinary practices (such as Fordism and Taylorism) to reproduce and expropriate productive social relationships. With the emergence of immaterial labor, life itself has become open to capital's command. As a result, capital can extract surplus value without even intervening politically or ideologically. This decentered form of govermentality, that characterizes societies of control, is ultimately empire's weakness, since its axes of repression are simultaneously its axes of transgression.


Biopolitical production
Biopower is a concept that originates with Michel Foucault and is used to describe "a form of power that regulates social life from its interior" (23). Foucault developed the concept of biopower as an alternative to the Marxian concept of ideology. Whereas ideology theory is interested in the way mystification takes place at the level of discourse, biopower is concerned with the way discourses and bodies are brought into being simultaneously as a "structure of feeling." The result is that biopower challenges the dual ontology between materiality and discourse, it demonstrates that discourses not only reproduce particular types consciousness (such as the bourgeois ideology) but also produce the corporeal, somatic, and affective properties of individual subjectivity.
As a mode of subjectification, biopolitical production could only develop in the modernist era; it could only exist in a time when the life sciences and research on eugenics were accorded fundamental values. Nevertheless, it is only in societies of control (or, in other words, postmodernity) that biopower has become the sole motor of social reproduction. While modernity used biopower as a tool for regulating the subjectivity of particular populations, in postmodernity biopower has subsumed the social bios as a whole. To this end, control societies and biopower (also know as biopolitical production) are one and the same: both autonomously propel the production and reproduction of global capitalist society.


Immanence
Immanence corresponds with the ideas of control societies and biopolitical production insofar as it views social organization as produced and reproduced prior to any model of human subjectification (e.g., Marx's base/superstructure, Freud's conscious/unconscious, etc.). At the same time, however, immanence is a transcendent concept; it is the Real (in the Lacanian sense) ontological state of being that exists prior to any dualistic human mediation. As a philosophical standpoint immanence reaches its zenith in the work of Baruch Spinoza who argued in the mid 17th century that man, nature, and god were one and the same to the extent that all move evanescently along the same plane of existence. Because of this belief in the immanent power of humanity, Hardt and Negri argue that Spinoza was the first genuine philosopher of modernist thought.
Spinoza's locating of the plane of immanence, nevertheless, was quickly undermined by a second set of (enlightenment) modernist thinkers such as Descartes, Hobbes, Hegel, and Marx. In their belief in the power of man to triumph over nature, all of these thinkers posed "a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire" (74). It is not until Nietzsche, Bergson, and later Deleuze that Spinoza's ontology of immanence became revitalized as a philosophical vantage point. In fact, it is Deleuze (the thinker which Hardt and Negri are most indebted to) who takes this heretical assemblage of thinkers to their logical conclusion, by developing a whole vocabulary of philosophical concepts centered on the Spinozian ideal of immanence. From an immanentist perspective, then, society always moves forward in a perpetual process of becoming. Its discourses, institutions, and technological processes are lines of flight that propel humanity forward. To this end, an immanent ontology is absolutely materialist (though not dialectical); it views history as the ultimate arbiter of human subjectivity.


Postmodernization
Hardt and Negri- echoing the thought of social theorists such as David Harvey and Fredric Jameson- "see postmodernity as a new phase of capitalist accumulation and commodification that accompanies the contemporary realization of the world market" (154). Instead of viewing postmodernity as an abstract theoretical framework, or set of ideas, then, postmodernity describes a particular assemblage of historical periodizations that have resulted from a variety of crises (or antagonisms) taking place inside capitalism. The most fundamental of these historical periodizations, according to Hardt and Negri, is the transition from a Fordist to postFordist mode of production. In postFordism "all economic activity tends to come under the dominance of the informational economy and to be qualitatively transformed by it" (p. 288). Productive practices that in the time of Marx were limited to material labor (e.g., mining, agriculture, factory manufacturing) have become transformed, from the ground up, by new informational technologies.
This incorporeal transformation means that scholars must understand the new types of immaterial labor being performed in late capitalist society. The rise of immaterial labor, or "labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication" (p. 290), demonstrates that the type of industrial labor that took place during the times of the Fordist assembly line is no longer in a hegemonic position. Although in quantitative terms industrial production appears to be the primary form of capitalist accumulation (that is, the production of surplus value), such an approach "cannot grasp either the qualitative transformation in the progression from one paradigm to another or the hierarchy among the economic sectors" (p. 281). In other words, because in late capitalism all nation-states are linked in a machinic network of power, the modes of production in the most dominant economic regions have a tendency to influence, regulate, and eventually transform the labor practices occurring in subordinate regions. While immaterial production may not be primary in regions such as Africa and Southeast Asia, then, it is the diachronic tendency and not the synchronic state of things that is necessary when theorizing the political action of tomorrow.
By understanding immaterial labor as the new hegemonic type of productivity in late capitalist society, Hardt and Negri are able to develop a new theory of antagonism and new theory of value. Because immaterial labor relies on communicatory frameworks to maintain capitalist productivity, agency lies in the constitutive power of communication, a possibility that did not exist in previous eras of production. Nevertheless, to act "as if discovering new forms of productive forces---immaterial labor, massified intellectual labor, the labor of the general intellect ---[is] enough to grasp concretely the dynamic and creative relationship between material reproduction and social reproduction" would be seriously problematic (p. 29). "The productivity of bodies and the value of affect . . . are absolutely central" to immaterial labor (p. 30).


Multitude
Although the multitude does not get developed in Empire to the extent that it does is their follow up book Mutlitutde: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, this political/social form plays a key role in empire. The multitude is Hardt and Negri's attempt to develop a new theory of class subjectivity, one that corresponds with the variety of changes that have occurred in postmodern capitalism. While the multitude includes those struggling for economic parity, and in fact views such struggles as crucial to its democratic project, it refuses to limit its conception of labor to that of the industrial working class. The industrial working class, while perhaps hegemonic in the time Marx was writing, is no longer the primary productive force in late capitalist society. Instead, a multiplicity of subject positions (centered around affect and immaterial labor) have all become productive of capital. As a result, only the multitude, the inverse of the people, offers an appropriate metaphor for describing this new revolutionary vanguard. As "the lifeblood of Empire," the multitude are necessary for capital's reign and if they were "subtract themselves from the relationship, [Empire] . . . would simply collapse into a lifeless heap" (Hardt and Negri, 2004, p. 335). The conclusion is that prerequisites for communism are already available, it is simply "a matter of recognizing and engaging the imperial [Empire] initiatives and not allowing them continually to reestablish order; it is a matter of gathering together these experiences of resistance and wielding them in concert against the nerve centers of imperial command" (p. 399).



Two Critiques of Empire


Lacalu
Asks whether immanence can explain social struggle. Claims that without the political production of antagonisms revolution happens on autopilot.

Response: Hardt and Negri's project of immanence can be defended on the same grounds that traditional Marxists, such as Cloud, have defended their approach toward agency. In Marxist theory, as noted earlier, the proletariat is immanent to the production of capitalism. Their rebellion, while not guaranteed, is a necessary possibility due to their relationship (as opposed to identity) to an a priori mode of production. In the same sense, then, we can view the immanence of the multitude as a radical political possibility. The multitude's relationship to Empire, while not preordained by god, makes it the only class composition that has the potential to overthrow late capitalism (empire).
On another level, just as Marxism cannot say what communism looks like because it has yet to happen, Hardt and Negri cannot say what exactly the multitude's political triumph will be like, because it too is currently only a relational possibility in need of practical politics. Nevertheless, instead of focusing on the totalizing power capital and viewing all social movements that do not involve the working class as "fantasy bribes," Hardt and Negri are able to discover a Real project of social transformation that is commensurate with our current historical epoch. Moreover, since Hardt and Negri, like traditional Marxists, have recourse to some a priori social formation (albeit one of immanence) they are able to maintain a commensurability with postmodernity without falling into the relativistic pitfalls of thinker's such as Laclau, Derrida, and Lacan.


Cloud, Callinicos, Wood, Zizek:
Argue that Hardt and Negri's project is nothing more than "mystical claptrap." Charge Hardt and Negri with being apologists for late capitalism. Associate Hardt and Negri's project with the position taken up in Stephen Spielberg's "The Land Before Time."

Response: Cloud and other Marxists ignore the primary axiom of historical materialism, the need to always historicize. One of Negri's greatest contributions as a Marxist scholar, over the past 40 years, has been to demonstrate that there have been multiple antagonisms that have taken place inside capitalism (e.g., Keynesianism, the new deal, the Vietnam war, postFordism, etc.). To limit our understanding of antagonism to contradictions set up by Hegelian (dialectical) Marxism, keeps social transformation in "a permanent state of anxiety" and promotes "hierarchical state thinking" by discursively creating the illusion that one antagonism is superior to all others. Moreover, even if at one time mobilizing the working class was the best option, the hegemonic tendency of immaterial labor, forces scholars to conceptualize a new political vanguard. For this reason, Marxism must recognize that the binary between reform and revolution is untenable. Further, such thinkers must accept that while capitalism can indeed be overthrown the pathway toward this rupture is completely overdetermined. The following quote by Michael Hardt in an interview in Theory, Culture and Society summarizes this position succinctly:
Capital is fundamentally anti-democratic. Any project for democracy will have to confront the anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian element of capital production - keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. But not every democratic political project need immediately confront the capitalist order as such. Let me put it this way, I don't think we are faced today with an alternative between reform and revolution. It seems to me that that is what the question brings up - is revolution required? And I don't think we are in a historical situation where the alternative really makes sense. The pathways of revolution and reform today coincide in many ways. When I'm saying this I'm trying to avoid forms of political thinking that say, `Since our objective is revolution we don't want reforms that makes people's lives better.' This was a revolutionary logic that we've seen in the recent past and, I think, among some today - an anti-reformist position in the name of revolution. And I think it is also equally mistaken to ban any talk of revolutionary change because it is unrealistic and insist on only the most immediate and practical reformist discussion. I think that today the two necessarily go hand in hand. One can't, in fact, think about reform without having a revolutionary perspective and visa versa. I am of the view that one is forced, when thinking about global democracy, to take an anti-capitalist perspective and think about and imagine the possibilities of a post-capitalist society, but not that all political actions have to be taken with that immediate overthrow in mind.