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The Ineducable Left
[Book Review of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire.]
"The far left’s disgraceful response to September 11 ... shows that its hatred of democratic capitalism and, more broadly, Western civilization itself remains fierce more than a decade after the collapse of socialism. ... one of the most pernicious books published in recent memory: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s encomium to anticapitalist revolutionary violence, Empire. This forbidding five–hundred–page book of political and social theory, which ends with a surreal celebration of “the irrepressible lightness and joy of being Communist ... Empire is also brashly optimistic, heralding the revolutionary dawn of a utopian postcapitalist age. ... Negri is a convicted terrorist."
"What is the argument, such as it is, of this strange book? ... 'Empire' is 'the sovereign power that governs the world'—a new 'capitalist mode of production.' It is, more concretely, the global market. At the pinnacle of Empire is the capitalist power par excellence, the nuclear–bomb–wielding U.S., 'a superpower that can act alone but prefers to act in collaboration with others.' ... The vertiginous market forces these political and economic bodies have unleashed are destroying the old imperialistic nation– state and creating in its stead a new transpolitical global order where economic considerations trump all other concerns."
"Economic globalization ... has meant that a handful of rich folks are getting richer and more powerful at the expense of the vast majority, who grow 'always more exploited, more abject, more 'proletarianized.' The new global order claims to promote peace, they charge, but in practice it is 'bathed in blood.' Any time Empire senses a danger to the circulation of commodities ... out come the guns and missiles to deal with the threat. Today’s Empire, like its Roman predecessor, is a brutal pacifying force. ... Citizens of prosperous liberal democracies only seem to be free. In reality ... they are subjects of terrifying 'societies of control,' consumed completely in the 'rhythm of productive practices and productive socialization.'"
"Gestating within the womb of economic globalization is a 'counter–Empire,' led by 'the multitude' ... those that don’t fit neatly into the global capitalist economy. ... anyone else who rejects bourgeois values ... the multitude will overcome the new Empire. The political task of the third millennium ... will be to help bring this multitude together so that it can forge 'an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges' that 'will one day take us through and beyond Empire.' What will this ... look like? ... Global citizenship ... an end to borders and nations ... A second aspect will be 'absolute democracy' No more ... private property ... Free access to and control over 'knowledge, information, communication, and affects' ... A final characteristic: equal compensation for all. ... a 'citizenship income.'"
"The counter–Empire is possible only after modernity ... has dissolved the certainties of all earlier ages. ... [the] multitude is a Promethean power, born with the modern age’s emancipation of the human will from the moral constraints of religion and human nature. ... We must embrace our 'post–human' identities as monkeys and cyborgs ... These epochal transformations will require a cleansing bloodletting."
"The [commercial] success of Empire is astonishing when you cut through the jargon and see exactly what it says. ... Hardt and Negri fail to think politically—fail to explore the real possibilities and dangers of political reality and take measure of the lessons of history."
"The truth about globalization is exactly the reverse of what Hardt and Negri assert. Globalization is dramatically increasing world prosperity and freedom. As the Economist’s John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge point out, in the half century since the foundation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the world economy has expanded six–fold, in part because trade has increased 1,600 percent; nations open to trade grow nearly twice as fast as those that aren’t; and World Bank data show that during the past decade of accelerated economic globalization, approximately 800 million people escaped poverty. ... [the book exposes] some of the less attractive aspects of today’s libertine culture. But on balance ... the empirical evidence proves it far preferable to any alternative economic order we know of. It has profoundly diminished human suffering. ... Hardt and Negri’s ... hazy alternative to it—absolute democracy, open borders, equal compensation—is apolitical utopian nonsense. ... a totalitarian style of thought that substitutes rhetorical violence for reasoned argument."
"For both good and ill ... the twenty–first century clearly will be religious, not secular. ... Without morality and the rule of law, the powerful simply feel free to rape and pillage; the weak can only tremble and hide. Apolitical abstraction and wild–eyed utopianism, a terroristic approach to political argument, hatred for flesh and blood human beings, nihilism: Empire is a poisonous brew of bad ideas."
" ... our flawed but decent democratic capitalist institutions—the best political and economic arrangements man has yet devised and the outcome of centuries of difficult trial and error ... " ... [more]
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