Empire
By Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri
Harvard University Press, 2000
480 pages, $47 (pb)
REVIEW BY ZANNY BEGG
Since being published almost two years ago, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's Empire has continued to create waves.
The popularity of the book is unquestionable. It sold 40,000 copies in its first year and has been praised by sources as diverse as the New York Times and the leader of the semi-anarchist Tute Bianche ("white overalls") movement, Luca Casarini. But for a book which concludes with the "irrepressible lightness and joy of being a communist", its popularity is puzzling.
What have Hardt, an associate professor in literature from Duke University in the US, and Negri, a theorist of "autonomist Marxism" currently confined to Rebibbia prison in Italy (framed for involvement in the Red Brigades), hit upon that has made them the next "Big Idea" for academics, conservative journalists and radical activists?
The answer lies partially in the complexity and ambition of Empire. It is, in the true sense of the word, a "grand narrative" that attempts to provide a total theory for understanding history and society.
Its enthusiastic embrace of globalisation theory and its celebration of the decline of the class struggle makes its tenets superficially palatable to pro-globalisation commentators, such as those from Time magazine and the New York Times (turning a blind eye to its call to "militancy" and "communism").
Its uplifting, almost heady, confidence and elegant analysis which spans Spinoza, Machiavelli, Hegel, Hobbes through to Jameson and Delueze and Guttiari makes it ready fodder for an academia which has been languishing in pessimistic post-modernism and is desperate for something to latch on to to drag it out of its malaise.
The academic rewards for Hardt have been quickly forthcoming; he has given a score or more academic talks and received tenure from Duke a year early. According to the professor of comparative literature and East Asian Studies at New York University, Hardt is "definitely hot".
More interesting is the left's assessment of Empire. Like Naomi Klein's No Logo, Empire has been described as the book of the new anti-corporate movement. Perhaps responding to the connection between this new movement and the ideas of Hardt and Negri, Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Zizek has described Empire as the "rewriting of the Communist Manifesto for our times". An enormous claim do Negri and Hardt live up to it?
The breadth of Empire is too wide to encompass in this short review but there are three main interrelated arguments which Hardt and Negri advance: imperialism has been superseded by "empire"; the nation-state has been diminished by this process; and the working class, as traditionally understood by Marxists, has been replaced by the "multitude".
The book commands attention as all of these arguments touch upon key debates of the revolutionary left.
Hardt and Negri's analysis can at times be wilfully obtuse. Although they sharply illuminate the tendencies at play, Hardt and Negri can also exaggerate them without providing empirical evidence to substantiate their claims.
In Empire, Hardt and Negri claim that the modern capitalist economy has been characterised by a tendency towards "deterritorialisation", the creation of "smooth space" where there is no "territorial centre of power", "no fixed boundaries" and "the distinct national colours of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow". But how "smooth" is world capitalism? The events since September 11 have demonstrated that the United States is the territorial centre of imperialist politico-military and economic power. There is clearly an enormous disparity between the wealth and power of the US ruling class and the capitalist rulers of Third World countries. The fracas over the International Criminal Court shows just how sensitive the rulers of the most powerful nation-state are to any infringement of their national sovereignty.
A surprising twist to Hardt and Negri's analysis of globalisation is the optimism which infuses Empire. There is no gloomy analysis of "defeats of the class" here. Empire brims with confidence: every restructuring of capital is explained by the agency of the multitude. According to Hardt and Negri, the accumulation of anti-capitalist struggles "determines the terms and nature of capitalist restructuring".
In the beginning of the book, the authors assert that the "working class has all but disappeared from view". But by this they do not mean that the class of wage workers has vanished (in fact, they point out that the industrial working class is the largest it has ever been) but that the classical Marxist position that the working class is the decisive force for revolutionary change is no longer valid.
Hardt and Negri argue that this is because the historic success of workers' in the factories has forced the capitalist class to fragment the experience of labour through the creation of more highly skilled and diversified workplaces which expropriate the creativity and cooperation of labour. Exploitation, they claim, has expanded from "production" to the entire "social terrain"; resistance has expanded from the working class to the multitude.
Empire describes the changing experience of labour, particularly in the First World, with the growth of the services sector. However, Hardt and Negri's conclusions seem exaggerated. While post-modernism may be a useful descriptive tool for the "cultural logic" of late capitalism, Hardt and Negri do not adequately explain how this nullifies the fundamental antagonism between the interests of capital and wage labour.
Not surprisingly, much left criticism of Empire has focused on Empire's departure from orthodox Marxism. Hardt and Negri seek to get around such criticism by arguing that Marx needed a Paris Commune to develop his understanding and the new struggles of the era of "empire" have yet to develop theirs.
While Hardt and Negri provide few answers to how to fan the flames of resistance to "globalised" capitalism, their book does draw attention to the key questions before the revolutionary left: Is globalisation a new phase of capitalist development? Has the working class been fragmented by it? What will the impact of this be on revolutionary strategy?
For these reasons alone (not counting its passion and optimism), Empire is an essential read.
From Green Left Weekly, August 7, 2002.
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