Review:
Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri 

reviewed by
Kurt Jacobsen

mpire is the silliest “serious” book I have ever had the misfortune to read all the way through since the late Allan Bloom’s ultra-dyspeptic right wing bestseller The Closing of The American Mind. I suppose now as then a lot of half-educated, overly earnest readers will dip into the profoundly numbing prose and emerge shivering and feverish, feeling like reborn, fully cultivated and thoroughly hip human beings. All one need do for redemption is wade resolutely through a woefully obscurantist four hundred plus page pseudo-philosophical obstacle course bristling with sub-Althusserian jargon—although poor demented Athusser, unlike Hardt and Negri, occasionally had brilliant things to say.

On principle, Hardt and Negri never stoop to use of a simple term where a supercallifragilisticexpialidocious monstrosity will substitute. One then watches in far from enraptured horror as the authors knit together the woolliest of conclusions from the stray floating fluff emitting from post-modernism’s worst tendency: a relentless reduction of everybody and everything to a phalanx of airy abstractions. Let’s talk about the “ganglia of the social structure” or the “collective biopolitical body” or “juridical transformative function” or maybe the “dense complex of experience,” not to speak of good old-fashioned (by now) “hybridity” which seems to be their key heroic notion: the more hybridity, the better.

What on earth is the “concrete universal,” and where is it? Mere mortals clinging to everyday “planes of immanence” by our fingernails may be pleased to hear that “ontology is not an abstract science” but a goodly few will reserve judgment on the, ahem, matter. Any New Age pilgrims who imagine that they can navigate this brave new globalizing world by the dim lights of the blurry instrument panel supplied here are well on their way to a dire plunge over the edge of the world straight into neo-virtual reality, which is way better than the real thing, which of course isn’t so real when you really examine it. I like “de-naturalizing” stodgy concepts as much as the next guy, but where is all this stuff going? There’s nothing here but recycled insights and ill-considered guesswork.

The authors’ ambition is to herald a remarkable new phase of capital accumulation, a frothy fermented post-modern phase. Like Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, Hardt and Negri come to bury capitalism, not only to praise it fulsomely. In so doing, they revive the hoary economistic creed that history is on “our” side whether the other guys like it or not. Their message of good cheer—the gospel inside the jargon—is that triumphalist capitalism, via the impersonal cunning of history, is producing a form of labor power that is “immaterial” and raring to go to overturn the creaky old binary order of self/other, and presumably capital/labor too. Immaterial labor produces “a service, cultural product, knowledge or communication.” It “involves social interaction and cooperation” such that workers “don’t need capitalists to supply elements that enable valorization, and can do it themselves which means” there is a mouth-watering “potential for a spontaneous and elementary communism.” As old-line communists foretold, the “circuits of production are finally making labor power capable of governing.” Productivity no longer results from abject “regulation of the multitude” but rather from “the productive synergy of the multitude” who produce as well “democratic pressure to surpass every limit.” Labor (I first slipped and wrote, life,) becomes “increasingly immaterial and realizes its value through a singular and continuous process of innovation in production, merging and hybridizing with the machine” in a “machinic metamorphosis” —call it android anarchism. Sound appealing? How about familiar?

A lot of people, from Marx and Engels to Daniel Bell and Brian Aldiss, have been here before. In her intriguing 1988 book In the Age of The Smart Machine, Shoshana Zuboff smartly tackled this subject of “immaterial labor” in a study of conflicts between management and the work force over control in several service industries where computerization enabled the devolving of the big boss man’s duties to the peons. But Zuboff stressed, like numerous other critics, that this potential is resisted by masters who don’t want their precious power to vanish. Hardt and Negri are majestically content to augur an empowered proletariat, then assume away the existence and importance of managers/owners/union breaking consultants and suchlike intent on shaping developments in their own interest. Does it not matter that there are agents out there avidly interested in keeping their good thing going?

Hardt and Negri believe there is afoot a “new global logic and structure of rules that reconfigures what we view as sovereignty.” Sovereignty for them is a bad thing, a betrayal, ultimately, of every progressive movement that ever arose. (Many scholars point out that sovereignty was always a porous and contested category.) Is anyone in charge here? The U.S. “does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperial project,” a statement which looks a tad premature in this post-9/11 world. The coming Empire instead is “the political subject that effectively regulates the global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world”—except “it” can’t be touched; “it” has no address; “it” is a phantasm that liberates capital from all remaining fetters, such as the state. Hardt and Negri’s promiscuous use of “it” dubiously presupposes that the “it” is not itself a political creation. They always speak of “processes of globalization” as if they were autonomous, as do business organizations, which lobby like crazy for rule changes and piously pretend afterward that the advantages they gained were an effect of impersonal forces. That, in good part, is how Enron, and all its associated malefactors, happened.

Without the state, “social capital has no way to project and realize its collective interests,” but the “decline of the autonomous political sphere” means that there is no point in trying to modify or even take control of the state. (Yet another venerable debate.) A “new type of resistance has to be invented,” but does it follow that all the old forms need to be ditched? Will humanitarian NGOs nudge aside nation-states? The link between sovereignty and the people—nationalism—may have been devised as a mystifying force but that is hardly all there is to it. Can anyone demonstrate that progressive movements occurring outside states have become the main driving forces of beneficial change within them? The “dominating powers,” unbeknownst to themselves, are “mutating.” So we need an “affirmation of fragmented identities as a means of contesting the sovereignty of both the modern subject and nation-state.” The state must be smashed, but in that unlikely event, aren’t the reins of power likely to be reconstituted nastily in the international realm, just as when a concert of European powers arose to crush the revolutions of 1848? They also oppose any futile “delinking” from the world economy, but delinking is different from demanding deals that are sensitive to internal needs. Dani Rodrick and others point out that states prosper more when they impose some conditions on “free” trade.

The “new symbolic order produced not only commodities but subjectivities” (although commodities disappear immediately after they are mentioned). Hardt and Negri’s discussion of the formation of subjectivities surprisingly agrees with the way so many “bourgeois” philosophers portray it, as a matter of pure passivity, of hapless subjects always being acted upon. The discourse-obsessiveness of the analysis make the clarion call that “Truth will not make us free, but taking control of the production of truth will” sounds downright Orwellian (our Ministry of Truth against theirs). The authors encourage the “affinity of hybridities and the free play of differences across boundaries” but corporate sharpies, as they say themselves, incorporate it,  revel in it and sell it back to us in house-trained forms. “The ideology of the world market has always been the anti-foundational and anti-essentiality discourse par excellence” so that “capitalist marketing strategies have long been postmodernist.” So what is to be done? Well, can you subtract yourself from the relations of domination? Great refusal, anyone?

Hardt and Negri plaintively argue that it’s good “not to forget the utopian tendencies that have always accompanied the progression toward globalization.” Sure, but when exactly did these utopian tendencies kick in and who exemplified them? The conquistadors or the U.S. cavalry or the British East India Company? The authors celebrate the “love of differences or the belief in the universal freedom and equality of humanity proper to the revolutionary thought of renaissance humanism.” But this tendency isn’t remotely promoted or desired by corporate CEOs whose highest idea of culture is shedding a safe tear at the opera. The latter want no part of untamable utopian tendencies. To take a page from Polanyi, could it be that what modern globalization under corporate auspices is battling is anyone who wants to reform, humanize, soften, or transform its harsh features to allow for a humane existence? The enemy that present-day globalization wants to steamroller is precisely the inadvertent ceding of power to (for lack of a better term) popular forces, to stamp out any inadvertent rebellious sparks it has spread since its inception. That may not be all that is happening, but it is part of it. As the authors admit, we are facing a “complex, contradictory, uneven development.”

The gist of the authors’ case only becomes clear when they fasten on Marx’s ambivalent celebration of British colonialization of India as an implicit analogy to modern global forces, as if the latter merely uprooted hidebound cultures with no progressive intent or possibilities within them. The benighted, the superstitious, the cruel are doomed. The new globalization has a “double mission,” as Marx wrote of India, “one destruction, the other regeneration—the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundation of western society in Asia.” This is the postmodern rendition of the invisible hand, which performs wonderful deeds that were no part of the ruler’s intentions. Don’t sweat the sweatshops, the forces of history are on our side. There’ll be pie in the sky, by and by. Is this a tune we need to hear credulous radicals singing?

They ultimately pin their hopes on “transversal mobility” which evidently generates “nomadic desires” that cannot be controlled within the “disciplinary regime,” a regime spreading willy-nilly throughout the world. The authors anticipate that the common interests of first world and third world workers (or “multitudes,” as they like to call them) will find effective expression through the different tools they wield to attack an increasingly de-legitimized order. Never underestimate the innovation and antagonism inherent in economic processes. Well, that at least is good advice. They hail the “profound economic power of cultural movements,” whatever that may mean, which forge a “new subjectivity” that changes everything. But enough. Somewhere in their long meandering tour through philosophers and critics,  Hardt and Negri accurately describe “Orientalism” as a scholarly project conducted “not to gain real knowledge but a discourse that creates its own object.” That unfortunately is exactly what they accomplish here in their own wrong-headed and supposedly counter-hegemonic way.