Empire (Paperback)

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.

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.