Empire

Book arrived promptly and well packaged. No discernible damage or extensive marks. Good quality.

Toni Negri is a man very known in Italy. He was considered long time a killer of Aldo Moro. He wins the process, next he has gone in France , where he became friend of Deleuze and Guattari. In Usa he has written this book of success. He is also great expert of the poetry of Leopardi. He is abile to understand the dynamics of Post-modern. But his polemics is too old when he talks about Marx.

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 conceptsDisciplinary 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 EmpireLacaluAsks 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.

Wonderful survey very helpful

Hard left but well written. Even if you are hard right, will give you some additional insight to current events. Somewhat turgid academic prose, but well worthwhile plowing through.