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Title: Review: Empire
Author: Andrew Flood
Date: March 2002
Language: en
Topics: book review, Empire, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Northeastern Anarchist
Source: Retrieved on March 24, 2016 from https://web.archive.org/web/20160324224455/http://nefac.net/node/179
Notes: Reviewed by Andrew Flood. Published in The Northeastern Anarchist Issue #4, Spring/Summer 2002. References with just page numbers are from Empire (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Harvard University Press, seventh printing 2001).

Andrew Flood

Review: Empire

The publication of Empire in 2000 created an intense level of discussion

in left academic circles that even spilled over at times into the

liberal press. This should please the authors, Antonio Negri, one of the

main theoreticians of Italian ‘autonomous Marxism,’ and a previously

obscure literature professor, Michael Hardt. It is clear that they see

Empire as the start of a project comparable to Karl’s Marx’s ‘Das

Kapital’. The Marxist Slavoj Zizek has called Empire “The Communist

Manifesto for our time”.

Whether or not you think Empire will be as useful as Capital, it has

certainly made an impact. The web is full of reviews of Empire from all

angles of the political spectrum. Orthodox Marxists gnash their teeth at

it, while right wing conspiracy theorists around Lyndon la Rouche see it

as confirmation [1] of the existence of a plan for globalization that

unites the ‘left and right’. After S11 numerous US liberal and

conservative reviews [2] made a big deal out of Negri’s ‘terrorist past’

(he is under house arrest in Italy for being an ideological influence on

the Red Brigades). They eagerly seize on Negri and Hardt’s description

of Islamic Fundamentalism as post- rather then pre-modern, and their

claim that it is a form of resistance to Empire as if this description

was intended as a justification for the attack.

Empire rapidly sold out after publication and the paperback edition I

have (bought in October 2001) is the seventh printing. Empire doesn’t

mention the Seattle protests at all and one suspects that, like Naomi

Klein, the authors have had the good fortune to write a book that would

be seized on to ‘explain’ the new movement before the movement itself

had come to the public’s attention. To an extent Empire probably

deserves this more than No Logo as Negri is one of the major

‘historical’ influences on the section of the movement around ‘Ya

Basta!’

Like Marx in Capital, Hardt and Negri admit that most of what they write

is not original; indeed a lot of the book is taken up with a discussion

of the philosophical sources that have led up to it. Like Capital, its

strength is in bringing together into a unified whole theories and

discussion from many different areas. As Hardt and Negri put it, their

“argument aims to be equally philosophical and historical, cultural and

economic, political and anthropological” [3]. It is also an attempt to

make Marxism relevant once more to the revolutionary project, often by

fundamental re-interpretation of areas of the writings of Marx and

Lenin. A lot of this is also not original, anyone who has tried to read

Negri’s previous works in English, in particular Marx Beyond Marx, will

be aware, one of his major projects is to rescue Marx from historical

Marxism.

For instance, Negri spends part of a chapter explaining how although

Lenin’s Imperialism may appear wrong it is in fact right because Lenin

“assumed as his own, the theoretical assumptions” of those he appears to

be arguing against [4]. Now while this may be useful for those who have

an almost religious attachment to the label of Marxism it is a big

barrier for any anarchist reading the book. But thankfully, although

this is part of Empire and indeed one of its major flaws, it is only

part; Empire contains much else besides. Later I’ll look specifically at

what anarchists can gain from this book. But let us start by looking at

what it actually argues.

A criticism that has to be made right from the start is that this is not

an easy book to read; In fact large sections of it are almost

unintelligible. Empire is written in an elitist academic style that is

almost designed to be understood only by the qualified few. The subject

matter and broad scope of the book would, in any case, make it difficult

but the authors also delight in obscurity, a very simple example being

the common use of Latin quotations without any adequate translation or

explanation.

This is particularly off-putting because they are quite capable of

writing in a clear fashion. Indeed, their strongest arguments seem to be

by far the ones that are expressed in the clearest language. It is when

they are on their weakest ground that it becomes increasingly difficult

to unwind what is actually being said.

This elitist academic style is also part of the Italian autonomist

tradition and illustrates how their use of the word “autonomy” does not

carry the same meaning as that given to it by anarchists. We aim to

build working class organizations that are autonomous from the state and

political parties. They intended the working class to be autonomous only

from capital. The worker will apparently still need be led by the

intellectual elite who are the only ones, in the autonomists’ eyes,

capable of reading the changes in strategies needed in the battle

against capitalism.

Even other Leninist commentators have attacked the “highly elitist

version of the party that emerges” [5] although given the record of the

organization concerned (British SWP) it is easy to suspect this is based

more on jealousy of the influence of autonomous Marxism then anything

else. But of course the autonomists views are quite consistent with

Lenin’s insistence in 1918 that “there are many.... who are not

enlightened socialists and cannot be such because they have to slave in

the factories and they have neither the time nor the opportunity to

become socialists” [6]. Autonomist Marxism is part of a rich history of

‘left-communism’ in Italy, which represented a break with the reformism

of the Communist Parties but only partly or not at all with its

authoritarian politics.

But enough of the background politics. What does Empire have to say? The

opening paragraph gives a good sense of the overall argument. “Empire is

materializing before our very eyes .... along with the global market and

global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic of

structure and rule — in short a new form of sovereignty”. Negri and

Hardt are not presenting Empire as a future plan of the ruling class or

a conspiracy of part of it. Instead they are insisting it has already

come into being.

It’s important right from the start to realize Negri and Hardt are not

arguing that Empire is simply a new stage of imperialism. Imperialism,

they say, was all about borders and the extension of the sovereignty of

the imperialist country over specific parts of the globe. They also

reject the idea that it is a process being controlled by the United

States or that it is even centered there. Rather they argue that it is a

“decentered and deterritoralizing apparatus of rule that progressively

incorporates the entire global realm within its open expanding

frontiers” [7]. The idea here is that there is no single institution,

country, or place that is becoming the command center of Empire. Rather

all the various global bodies, from the ones with formal power like

United Nations or those with less formal power like the World Economic

Forum alongside the corporations, the military and, to a much lesser

extent, the worlds people have interacted to create a global network

distribution of power. This network has no center and is not based in

any country but is rather spread globally.

The internet is an obvious analogy for this sort of power distribution.

No one body controls it yet it obviously exists, decisions are made on

its future and in reality control is exercised over it though national

government, service providers and cyber-censor software. Schools

restrict access to particular web sites, employers monitor the email of

their workers and parents and sometimes libraries use cyber-censor

software to prevent access to certain types of information.

There is, however, one point where Empire does give the US a privileged

position. This is the constitutional process that is part of the

formation of Empire. The opening chapters discuss how this operates both

on the formal level of international law and the informal level of the

discussion and lobbying around these bodies. Hardt and Negri see the US

constitution as representing a historical precedent and model for this

discussion. They claim for instance that Jefferson’s contributions to

the original constitution actually aimed for a network distribution of

power. [8]

It is easy to make a counter argument that the UN and similar bodies are

not really global but dominated by the old imperialist powers [9]. The

top powers have a veto at the UN Security Council and without the

Security Council the UN takes no effective action. Every World Bank

president has been a US citizen and the US is the only country with a

veto at the IMF. Hardt and Negri answer this by saying that this very

bias is what is driving the formation of Empire forward. “In the

ambiguous experience of the UN, the juridical concept of Empire began to

take shape” [10]. It is trivial to observe that the reaction of many on

the left to the bias of the UN sanction’s against Iraq for instance or

the failure to take effective action over Israel is to call for a better

(and more powerful) United Nations.

Central to Hardt and Negri’s argument is the idea that interventions are

no longer taking place along the lines of national imperialist interest

but rather as global police actions legitimated by universal values

[11]. They admit that intervention is “dictated unilaterally by the

United States” [12] but insist that “The US world police acts not in

imperialist interest but in imperial interest”.[13] This, they insist,

is a role imposed on the US and that “Even if it were reluctant, the US

military would have to answer the call in the name of peace and

order”.[14] The idea here is that US military intervention is no longer

simply taking place for ‘US national interests’ (i.e. the interests of

US capital) but instead occurs in the interests of Empire. One problem

with the book is it presents no empirical evidence for any of its

claims, and here is one point where evidence is really needed. Much of

Hardt and Negri’s discussion is drawn from the 1991 Gulf War. Yet even a

casual glance at that war shows that alongside the massive US military

intervention went a political intervention designed to ensure that the

profits of that war, in re-building contracts, military arms sales and

oil field repair flowed to the US rather then to any of its ‘allies’.

On the other hand, during the Rwandan genocide in 1994 there was no such

compulsion on the US to intervene despite the horrific scale of the

slaughter. What intervention occurred was of the old fashioned

imperialist kind. When tens of thousands was already being killed on

“April 9–10, 1994 France and Belgium send troops to rescue their

citizens. American civilians are also airlifted out. No Rwandans are

rescued, not even Rwandans employed by Western governments in their

embassies, consulates, etc.” [15]

Hardt and Negri cite Bosnia (where again one can point to political

struggles between the US, Germany, France and Britain over their various

‘national interests’ in the region), but Rwanda passes without mention.

Surely this makes nonsense of any argument that we moved towards a set

of universal rights imposed/granted by Empire? The authors simply ignore

this glaring contradiction with their model.

The initial reaction of many Empire fans to S11 was that this was an

almost perfect example of the sort of struggle between an imperial

police action and a decentered resistance to Empire. But the Afghan war

turned almost instantly into a national war with the Afghan government

(the Taliban) squarely in the bombsights rather than the ‘de centered’

Al Quaeda. At the time of writing that war it turning into yet another

colonial style occupation using a local government heavily dependent on

imperialist (rather then imperial) troops to maintain order. The

treatment of the prisoners at Guatanamo Bay briefly raised a discussion

of universal values (with regards to the treatment of prisoners). This

was rapidly stamped on by George Bush Jr. and the US military, the very

forces that we might expect from Empire to be imposing such values.

The wider political row between the European imperialist powers and the

US over the planned attacks on Iraq, Iran and perhaps even North Korea

on the one hand and on US support for Israel on the other again points

to a pattern of intervention dictated by US ‘national interests’ alone.

A non-military example is found in the unilateralist tearing up of the

Kyoto greenhouse gas agreement by George Bush on his inauguration. In

this case he quite openly claimed US national interest as his

justification stating “We will not do anything that harms our economy,

because first things first are the people who live in America”. [16]

All of this suggests that US policy, including military policy, is still

determined by what is best for US capital rather than what is best for

Empire. This is not quite to claim Empire’s argument is useless, it does

offer a convincing sketch of how a truly global capitalism might exist

and perhaps even be coming into existence. But in assuming the existence

of Empire now it leaves a lot to be explained.

Much of what I covered so far is summarized quite well in the preface of

the book. Fortunately it’s also the easiest part to understand. But

Empire is not simply a description of the evolution of capitalism to a

new form. It is far wider in its aim to be a post-modern ‘grand

narrative’, providing an overarching view of how society (dis)functions

and how it can be transformed. Now I make no claim whatsoever to

expertise on post-modernism because my limited forays into it have been

discouraged by the sheer weight of academic jargon one is required to

try and digest. So treat the analysis that follows with caution!

The most obvious critique of post-modernism from an anarchist

perspective is that in its rejection of revolutionary program, the

centrality of the working class, the Enlightenment, Scientific truth

etc, etc it left the revolutionary nothing to construct and nowhere to

go. It may at times offer a powerful criticism both of life under

capitalism and the traditional left but it leaves one with no

alternative. Negri and Hardt are attempting to sketch just such an

alternative in Empire.

And this is where things get tricky. As anyone who has tried to approach

post-modern political writing will know that the very language it is

written in makes the ideas very difficult to grasp. You are left with

the strong suspicion that this impenetrable form of expression is

intended to disguise the fact that there is not much in the way of real

ideas present. But let us try and have a peek.

The most obvious question that arises from the idea of de-centered power

is how will control over the working class will be maintained by

capital? After all strong imperialist powers played an essential role in

the development of capitalism from the conquest of the Americas and the

slave trade to containing ‘national liberation’ struggles so that

independence could be granted while guaranteeing capitalist stability.

Empire essentially turns to the ideas of Foucault to explain how this

will be done. Foucault argued that we have moved from a “disciplinary

society” where discipline was imposed in the school, army, factory or

jail to a “society of control” where discipline exists everywhere, in

all aspects of life, internalized by people [17]. He used the expression

biopower which “is a form of power that regulates social life from

within”.

Actually the basic idea of the regulation of social life from within may

be familiar to many libertarian communists. Maurice Brinton’s The

Politics of the Irrational (1970), which drew on the work of the German

communist Willaim Reich, analyzed why some workers supported Fascism or

Bolshevism and other authoritarian ideologies against their own

objective interests. They attributed this to the fact that workers have

internalized the authoritarian concept of discipline. We are controlled

not just by the fascist or Bolshevik secret police but primarily from

within by the ideas formed from everything we are exposed to.

Reich, as Foucault was later to do, placed sexual repression at the

heart of this disciplining process writing “the goal of sexual

repression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the

authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and

degradation.... The result is fear of freedom, and a conservative,

reactionary mentality. Sexual repression aids political reaction, not

only through this process which makes the mass individual passive and

unpolitical, but also by creating in his structure an interest in

actively supporting the authoritarian order.” [18]

The arguments in Empire also flow from the work of two other

Focauldians, Deleuze and Guattari, whom Empire says “present us with a

properly poststructuralist understanding of biopower that renews

materialist though and grounds itself solidly in the question of

production of social being” [19]. Hardt and Negri also argue that

autonomous Marxists established the importance of production within the

biopolitical process.

This is built on the theory of the ‘social factory,’ where the working

class is not simply composed of the industrial workers of orthodox

Marxism but also all those whose labor or potential labor creates and

sustains the industrial city (or social factory). This includes

housewives, students and the unemployed. Empire argues that what

capitalism produces are not just commodities but also subjectivities.

This idea is not all that original in itself; after all even Marx

observed that the dominant ideas in any era were those of the ruling

class. What Empire seeks to do is put some of the mechanisms which

produce these subjectivities at the heart of the productive process of

capitalism.

Because they put this production of subjectivity at the center of Empire

they argue that the old center of the working class, that is industrial

workers, have been replaced by “intellectual, immaterial and

communicative labor power” [20]. This claim has been criticized by

pointing out that even in the US there are more truck drivers then

computer programmers [21] but Empire counters this criticism by pointing

out that the industrial jobs that exist are now governed by information

technology. The Detroit car factories may have moved to Mexico rather

then simply vanishing but the Mexican based industry does not simply

re-create that of 1960’s Detroit. Rather in using the latest technology

it creates a labor process that is dependant on information workers as

well as those on the assembly line.

They go beyond this argument that the center of the working class has

shifted. They essentially drop the category of ‘working class’ as

outdated [22]. They see the proletariat as having grown but in their

arguments shift to using the category of multitude. Although they never

clearly define what they mean by multitude [23] it appears to mean

something similar the way sections of even the Irish Trotskyist left now

say ‘working people’ rather then working class. The need for this new

term is an artifact of Marxism and in particular the way that Marx

choose to define a working class separate from and hostile to the

peasantry on the one hand and the lumpen-proletariat on the other. That

industrial working class may now be bigger then it was when Marx wrote

but it is also often only one of a number of sections of the proletariat

in the vanguard of struggle.

This brings us back to one of the bigger flaws of the book. Many of the

better conclusions it reaches, for instance that national liberation

struggles offer no way forward, are conclusions anarchists reached 170

years ago. Similarly anarchists have no need to redefine the working

class as ‘multitude’ precisely because we always argued for a working

class that included those elements Marx sought to exclude. From the

start anarchists addressed both the peasantry and what is called the

‘lumpen-proletariat’ as part of the working class, sometimes even as

part of the vanguard of that class rather then something outside and

hostile to it. Perhaps anarchism has now become the ‘stopped clock that

is right twice a day’ but I’m more inclined to argue that this

demonstrates that Marxism took a wrong turn when these arguments split

the 1^(st) International in the 1870s. In that case much of the

convoluted argument is Empire is only necessary because the authors

choose to stand within the Marxist tradition.

Many of the reviews actually call Hardt and Negri anarchists. They

really only try to address this obvious similarity with anarchist

arguments at one point, when they rejoice in the end of “big government”

which “forced the state to produce concentration camps, gulags, ghettos

and the like”. Here, where there conclusions are so obviously close to

anarchism, they fudge the argument saying “We would be anarchists if we

not to speak (as did Thrasymacus and Callicles, Plato’s immortal

interlocutors) for the standpoint of a materiality constituted in the

networks of productive cooperation, in other words, from the perspective

of a humanity that is constructed productively, that is constituted

through the “common name of freedom. [24]” This sentence is also a good

illustration of how the arguments and language of the authors becomes

more obscure the weaker their points are. Even leaving aside the

reference to Greek philosophy, it’s pretty hard to work out what Hardt

and Negri are saying. They seem to be making the ludicrous suggestion

that anarchists are not materialists, but it is hard to credit authors

who go to extraordinary lengths to demonstrate their knowledge with such

an ignorant position.

On the positive side one of the interesting and indeed most refreshing

aspects of autonomous Marxism is that they turn the traditional left

analysis of the relationship between capital and the working class on

its head. In the autonomist tradition it is the success of working class

struggle that forces changes on capital. On its own, they insist,

capital contains almost no creative power. Although they often overstate

their case, there is something quite encouraging in the overall picture

of capital forced to modernize by working-class struggle as opposed to a

working class always being the victim of capitalist modernization.

In this case Hardt and Negri argue that the development of Empire is

something the working class has imposed on capital. They recognize that

it is easy it fixate on ways the development of Empire makes traditional

working-class organization weaker (e.g. removing the ability of unions

to restrict capitalism on a national basis). But they claim what is more

important is that by breaking down the barrier between first and third

world so that both come to exist alongside each other everywhere capital

has lost some of the most powerful weapons it had to divide the working

class. Cecil Rhodes is quoted in relation to class relations in Britain

“If you want to avoid civil war then you must become imperialists” [25]

So if Empire means the end of imperialism, it also means the end of

capitalism’s ability to use third-world labor to buy off sections of the

first-world working class. As elsewhere, though this is an argument that

you really need to able to back up with some empirical evidence. There

is no denying that the third and first world increasingly exist yards

from each other in the great cities. Washington DC is almost as famous

for its homelessness and poverty as it is for being the capital of the

richest state in the world. Anyone visiting Mexico City or a host of

other ‘third-world’ cities is struck by the obvious wealth and the glass

skyscrapers of the few that exist alongside the shanty towns and

desperate poverty of the many. Yet wage differentials between workers in

the west and elsewhere are still enormous.

The above is a brief survey of some of the more interesting areas of

Empire. But as I’ve noted it is a very dense book. Hardt and Negri say

at the start Empire is not necessarily intended to be read from start to

finish, dipping in here and there is intended to carry its own rewards.

Finally let us move onto the weakest area of Empire, the way it suggests

we can move forwards. Let us start by noting that Hardt and Negri

recognize that their suggestions here are weak but see this as

inevitable at this stage. They say any new and successful opposition

will be required to define its own tactics. Returning once again to Marx

they point out that “at a certain point in his thinking Marx needed the

Paris Commune in order to make the leap and conceive communism in

concrete terms as an effective alternative to capitalist society.” [26]

This is not a sufficient explanation for the weakness in their positive

program. Even their historical comparison with Marx’s writing before the

commune is flawed. The Paris Commune (1871) did force Marx to reconsider

his ideas of revolutionary organization and the state. But the early

anarchist movement predicted the form it took.

In 1868 they wrote: “As regards organization of the Commune, there will

be a federation of standing barricades and a Revolutionary Communal

Council will operate on the basis of one or two delegates from each

barricade, one per street or per district, these deputies being invested

with binding mandates and accountable and revocable at all times.

An appeal will be issued to all provinces, communes and associations

inviting them to follow the example set by the capital, to reorganize

along revolutionary lines for a start and to then delegate deputies to

an agreed place of assembly (all of these deputies invested with binding

mandates and accountable and subject to recall), in order to found the

federation of insurgent associations, communes and provinces in

furtherance of the same principles and to organize a revolutionary force

with the capability of defeating the reaction” [27].

This may seem like a side issue but it is striking when reading Empire

how the history and writers of the anarchist movement are ignored even

when the conclusions reached seem so relevant to the arguments of our

movement. Perhaps this simply because anarchism neither sought nor

achieved the academic stardom sought by so many Marxist professors. But

for an anarchist reading Empire, these omissions can only be described

as a constant source of annoyance.

More importantly, the example above suggests that like the early

anarchists we can make much better ‘educated guesses’ at the future

forms of struggle the Hardt and Negri claim. From the European and North

American struggles against border controls to the Zapatistas of Mexico,

there are certain clues that can be read. With the emergence of the

globalization movement and its emphasis on militant action, direct

democracy and diversity the probable methods of organization start to

become clear. Empire may have been written before all this became very

clear after Seattle, but even before Seattle numerous texts had been

written on the forms new movements. In particular, the Zapatistas were

taking. Given their political background, Hardt and Negri must have been

aware of this discussion, it is curious they fail to mention it.

Leaving that aside, Empire’s strongest point is that it rejects some of

the so-called alternatives that are around, in particular any idea of

anti-globalization or de-globalization for a return to old style

national capitalism. At the moment of writing the reformist forces in

the movement against corporate globalization have been arguing precisely

for such a de globalization at the World Social Forum in Porte Alegre,

Brazil. Instead Hardt and Negri argue we must “push through Empire to

come out the other side” [28]

Here, despite the flaws, Empire may have a significant role to play in

relation to the non-anarchist sections of the movement around

globalization. Many of these sections are dependent on the theories of

earlier generation of Marxists that seem to point to a solution in the

nation state and a return to the era of protectionism. The academics

pushing this idea may be more inclined to accept correction from a

couple of fellow academics then from those they seek to dismiss as

‘window breakers’ out to ruin ‘our movement’.

Anarchists have generally rejected the anti-globalization label. My

contribution to the S26 Prague counter summit demonstrates the line of

the anarchist argument: “.... the real forces of globalization are not

gathering on Tuesday at the [Prague 2000] IMF/WB summit, rather they are

gathering here today [at the counter summit] and on Tuesday will be

blockading that summit. We are a global movement; we fight for the

rights of people and not capital and to any sane person this should be

far more fundamental. The very governments that are most pushing the

idea of ‘global free trade’ are the same ones that are construct massive

fences along their borders and employ tens of thousands of hired thugs

to prevent the free movement of people.” [ 29]

In dismissing a return to localization, what alternatives do they put

forward? The initial starting point of their alternative is an unusual

choice, St. Augustine and the early Christian church in Rome. They draw

parallels with the way the early Christian church transformed rather

then overthrew the Roman Empire. Hardt and Negri argue that, like the

early church, we need a prophetic manifesto around which to organize the

multitude [29]. Like Augustine, they say we need to talk of constructing

a utopia, but our utopia is simply an immediate one on earth. They

praise the early Christian project in the Roman Empire, clearly with

intended lessons for today’s Empire, when they write; “No limited

community could succeed and provide an alternative to imperial rule;

only a universal, catholic community bringing together all populations

and all languages in a common journey could accomplish this”.

One suspects they are chuckling at the fact that almost all the orthodox

Marxist reviews will be apoplectic over the religious imagery. The last

paragraph of the book contains what can only be intended as a deliberate

provocation of the left in holding up the legend of Saint Francis of

Assisi “to illuminate the future life of communist militancy” [30] A

successful windup as this quote is singled out again and again in left

reviews!

A model that will sit happier with anarchists is the Industrial Workers

of the World (IWW). “The Wobbly constructed associations among working

people from below, through continuous agitation, and while organizing

them gave rise to utopian thought and revolutionary knowledge” [31].

Here again thought they show a real weakness in their grasp of

libertarian history as they claim that while the IWW wanted to organize

the whole world “in fact they only made in as far as Mexico” [32]. In

fact the IWW also organized in several other countries including South

Africa, Australia and Chile, [33] where they reached a size and

influence comparable with that reached in the USA. And if the IWW is

such a useful model, it’s odd that they fail to discuss what it is doing

today, perhaps they are unaware that it still exists in several

countries and see only its historical past?

Hardt and Negri move on to identify the “will to be against” [34] as

central in the struggle for counter-Empire. They reckon that resistance

to Empire may be most effective by subtracting from it rather then

confronting it head on. Central to this they identify “desertion, exodus

and nomadism”. If you hear an echo of Bob Black’s, this is probably

because some of his writings are also based on the refusal of work

advocated by the autonomists in Italy at the end of the 1970s’.

Sections of their suggested methods of struggle are quite bizarre. For

instance, apparently body-piercing represents the start of an important

strategy which will become effective only when we create “a body that is

incapable of adapting to family life, to factory discipline, to the

regulations of a traditional sex life, and so forth” [35].

But other suggested methods bare further investigation. They point out

that labor mobility has often been a weapon against capitalism [36].

They acknowledge that migration often means misery for those forced to

move. Yet, they say in fleeing, for instance, low wages in one region,

people are resisting capitalism. Global capitalism wants a global world

where particular regions have low labor-costs, but if the people of that

region flee then capitalism fails to get its cheap labor force.

This puts the current struggles for no immigration controls into a much

clearer focus, or at least provides a useful alternative way of viewing

them. Fortress Europe, for instance, then has the purpose of trying to

keep workers trapped in conditions of low income and living conditions,

a wall that is keeping people in rather then keeping them out.

Consider the one clear recent example where labor mobility had

revolutionary implications. The process that brought down the Berlin

wall (a barrier to labor mobility) and then the entire state-capitalist

East was triggered by thousands of East German workers fleeing to Prague

and either leaving for the West, or when the border was shut, occupying

the various embassy grounds. Today Cuba also has tightly controls

emigration for similar reasons. Empire comes up with three key demands

for the construction for a new world. These are the right to global

citizenship and “a social wage and guaranteed income for all”. To this

is added the right to re-approbation which first of all applies to the

means of production but also free access to and control over knowledge,

information and communication.

Of these three demands, it strikes me that the demand for global

citizenship is the one that has already created an issue that is

immediately global but also local. The right to free movement without

border controls is being fiercely contested all over the globe. In

Ireland, we are familiar with the struggles within the first world for

papers for all and the struggles on the borders of Fortress Europe to

gain entry. On almost every border across the world this struggle is

re-created as capital tries to control and even profit from the

migration of people. On the northern border of Mexico it is on the US

side that migrants are intercepted but on the Southern border with

Guatemala the patrols of the Mexican ‘migration polices’ are found on

every back road.

In this closing ‘what is to be done’ section one can’t help but notice

that the book has not really addressed what shape this future society

might take. Avoidance of this issue is part of the Marxist tradition,

but, given the authors repeated calls for the construction of utopian

visions and prophetic manifestos, it is a little odd here. This really

is the same weakness as the one mentioned earlier, a complete absence of

discussion around the existing movements of opposition.

I suspect the problem here is again the political tradition of Leninism

from which Empire emerges and to which Negri wishes to hold onto. Lenin

in power saw to it that the ‘utopian experiments’ of the Russian

revolution were crushed in their infancy. Self-management in the

factories was replaced by “unquestioning submission to a single will

....the revolution demands, in the interests of socialism, that the

masses unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of the labor

process.”[37]. It is very hard to tell from Empire what the

decision-making structures of a post-Empire society might look like. Yet

after the failure of socialism in the 20^(th) century this is the key

question in constructing new ‘utopian’ visions of the future.

Is Empire worth reading? My answer to that question would really depend

on who is asking. For anarchists, I would say that unless you have time

on your hands or are already familiar with post-modern jargon, there is

not much point in doing anything but dipping in here and there to

satisfy your curiosity. Much that is said in Empire will already be

familiar from various anarchist texts, quite often expressed in a way

that are a lot easier to understand.

For those with limited time, just read the preface, intermezzo and the

last chapter which will give you about 80% of the ideas in 12% of the

pages! In general Empire at first appears to be stuffed full of new

ideas, but then on reflection you get the idea that the ‘Emperor has no

clothes’. In the end, through, there are gems of insight buried amongst

the mass of jargon. I suspect Empire’s real usefulness will be as a

respectable academic Marxist text that will be picked up by a lot of

people who won’t, for one reason or another, seriously read anarchist

material. There is rather a lot of nonsense spoken by those active in

the globalization movement, often based on Marxist orthodoxy. Empire,

for all its flaws, is not at all orthodox and should have the effect of

forcing such people to challenge a number of their basic assumptions. If

this ends up with them coming over to one wing or another of the

libertarian, anti-state, anti-capitalist camp this can only be a good

thing.

[1] See for instance “Toni Negri, Profile of A Terrorist Ideologue” in

Executive Intelligence Review, August 2001.

[2] The most seriously argued of these is “The Snake”, by Alan Wolfe,

written for The New Republic; a lot of the other ones just rip this

review off, often without attribution!

[3] Preface XVI.

[4] page 229.

[5] Jack Fuller, “The new workerism: the politics of the Italian

autonomists”, International Socialist, Spring 1980, reprinted at

www.isj1text.fsnet.co.uk

[6] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 27 page 466.

[7] Preface XII.

[8] Preface XIV.

[9] See for instance the author’s “Globalization: the end of the age of

imperialism?”, Workers Solidarity No 58, 1999,

struggle.ws

[10] page 6.

[11] page 18.

[12] page 37.

[13] page 180.

[14] page 181.

[15] PBS Online special on Rwanda,

www.pbs.org

[16] Quoted at Financial Times Biz/Ed site in

www.bized.ac.uk

[17] Page 23.

[18]

W. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Orgone Institute Press, New

York, 1946, pp. 25–26.

[19] Page 28.

[20] Page 53.

[21] See Left Business Observer Feb 2001, review at

www.leftbusinessobserver.com

[22] Page 56.

[23] See page 103 for the closed approach to a definition.

[24] Page 350.

[25] Page 232.

[26] Page 206.

[27] “Program and Object of the Secret Revolutionary Organization of the

International Brotherhood” (1868) as published in “God and the State”,

No Gods, No Masters Vol 1, p. 155.

[28] Page 206.

[29] Page 61.

[30] Page 413.

[31] Page 412.

[32] Page 208.

[33] On the history of the IWW in Chile, a Chilean anarchist recommends

Peter De Shazo’s “Urban Workers and Labor Unions in Chile 1903 to 1927”

to me.

[34] Page 210.

[35] Page 216.

[36] This was shown right from the start of capitalism in mirror image

as the slave trade forcibly moved millions of people from Africa to the

Americas with all sorts of legal and physical restrictions to retain

them in place both during the passage but also at their destination.

South Africa’s pass laws also come to mind as a capitalist strategy

designed to not only control black labor but also to keep labor costs

down.

[37] Quoted in M. Brinton The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, page 41