Empire

Rating:
Summary: The Way It Is, The Way It Is Supposed To Be
Review: "Empire" lays out how the authors perceive the world to be today -- the way it is. If you really care about this, no matter which side of the issue you are now leaning toward, you should now go on to get the whole story before you come to any conclusions. I recommend that you read "West Point: Character Leadership Education, A Book Developed From The Readings And Writings Of Thomas Jefferson" by Norman Thomas Remick -- a book about the way it is supposed to be. It provides the historical and philosophical information needed for solutions to the problems posed by Hardt and Negri in their interesting book, "Empire".

Rating:
Summary: Interesting observations, fleeing from Marx
Review: Before I begin: 1) I laugh at every reactionary ideologue who claims to be objective, demcocratic, humane, etc. Please go somewhere else with your blather. 2) the Italian government framed Negri...On to Empire.

Good: Some very interesting insights into how the world is changing and how transnational institutions are really developing into more than mere window dressing. The idea of 'multitude' certainly opens things up a bit and frankly its pretty slick as a catchword.

Bad: I actually think that, theoretically, Negri and Hardt are retrograde. Hard to get into it here without jargon, so I apologize in advance. I feel that Negri recapitulates the crude neo-Stalinism of Althusser and Balibar. Negri has been moving away from his roots in Italian autonomist Marxism for almost two decades. Whatever they are doing, it really isn't related to Marx, but rather a radical redressing of currently fashionable bourgeois ideology (post-structuralism and a revamped Spinozism, basically) which breaks fundamentally with Marx's critique of capital and which will, in the end, drive people away from Marx.

Negri and Hardt appeal to young radical intellectuals much as Althusser did in the 1960's and 1970's, and it will be just as poisonous. From the rejuvenation of structuralism, functionalism, and politicism, they run to the praise of the Militant (in place of Althusser's Party) as the creative force of revolution, against an inert, suicidal mass. The elitism is appalling, as is the incipient Leninism.

Simon Clarke's work in the book "One Dimensional Marxism", and his essays on Nicos Poulantzas in issues 2 and 5 of Capital and Class make a good starting critique. Follow it up with the hard to find essay "Beyond Autonomy and Perversion" by Werner Bonefeld and "From Capitalist Crisis to Proletarian Slavery" by George Caffentzis. This provides the beginning of a thorough critique.

Whichever way you look at it, however, this book has to be dealt with seriously and there is really nothing else which attempts a serious theorization of globalization outside of bourgeois social theory. I gave it four stars for provocation.

Rating:
Summary: could be great
Review: This is an interesting book, but I'm with most of the other reviewers == too dense and too much!

Rating:
Summary: Yes, Intellectuals are Esoteric
Review: I agree that Hardt and Negri did not write this book for Uncle Joe and Aunt Sally (symbolic violence). I also feel that this is unfortunate because they make some interesting arguments. In my opinion, these authors thought that their "message" was very important and needed to be read by "the most important people". Unfortunately they believe that "the most important people" are future professors and current professors. I think that most of us would tend to think "the most important people" are the "multitude" or "the people" (to use Hardt and Negri's language). Why do these authors believe that academics should read their book? Ironically, they might have faith in an educational trickle-down theory!

OK so let us assume you DO have a strong background in Critical, Cutlural, Political, Philosophical, and Literary Theory. I assume that the arguments made by Hardt and Nergi are currently being debated within your fields as they are in my field. I highly suggest picking up this book. I will warn you that some chapters may be harder to read than others because you lack the specific background (for example Hegal and Kant). If you are somewhat "well read" in the academic areas mentioned above (for example: you know something about postmodern and post colonial theory), I suggest you pick up this book. After you have read the book - talk to your friends about it and use it in your classes (trickle down theory)- unless you believe in vanguard-elite-domination of knowledge production and consumption!

PS In my opinion, the first chapter are the WORST (1.1 thru 1.3)so I'd do a quick reading.

Rating:
Summary: So typical of European intellectuals:...
Review: ....do not write for the readers, do write for yourself!". The less the mass understand the better. Just one question: are you sure you know where you're going, or you're writing it for money? Wouldn't qualify for the "top thousand things to do with your money".

Rating:
Summary: Stop Global Whining
Review: Be forewarned - I did not finish reading this book. Once you get the drift of the argument, continued reading is very tedious.

The ideas in this book are really quite simple, and very old, but they are obscured in a rich pseudo-intellectual jargonization that attempts to make you feel ignorant if you dare to disagree.

Basically this book calls for the end of private property, the end of borders, and extreme democracy that verges on global mob rule, (complete with veiled calls to violence against, you guessed it, all the old enemies: white male Westerners, especially those who word hard and earn a descent living). The jargon is so thick though, that you can't help suspect that the authors really don't want you to know what they mean, which, once you figure it out you can see why. If stated in plain language, nobody with any sense would be interested.

Luckily, the book is so difficult to read that most people will just carry it around and leave it on their desks, to look sophisticated. If you are of the suede elbow patch persuasion, and especially if you affect an unlit briar pipe, this is the book to own.

Rating:
Summary: Marxenstein meets Foucaultman
Review: Remember those classic monster flicks of yesteryear - Frankenstein, Wolfman, and Dracula? They scared the hell out of everybody and packed the movie houses, so naturally the studios had to make sequels. Eventually they ran out of ideas for them so one day a studio executive had a great idea.
"It can't miss, J.B.! We'll put 'em all in one movie. People will have to see it!"
And so they did. Frankenstein met Wolfman, who hobnobbed with Dracula. People loved it. Still, this got old, too, so eventually the whole thing, which had started out so scary, was reduced to farce when they all met Abbot and Costello.
If you substitute "leftist thought" for monster movies. you'll pretty much get the essence of EMPIRE. The original scaries were Marx, Lenin, and Mao. The sequels were The Frankfurt School, Marcuse, and the French structuralists like Foucault. Since EMPIRE is written in such dense postmodern prose, it's hard to tell whether this is Marxenstein meets Focaultman or whether the authors are really just a modern-day Abbot and Costello having a fine laugh on the postmoderns.
Essentially there isn't anything new here - it's just promiscuous mismash of traditional Marxism laced with postmodern ideas of "culture." If you ever had any doubts that the Left is out of ideas and has been for thirty years, this book will lay them to rest.
The book's strength, if it can be said to have one, is that it's loaded with trendy buzzwords and feel-good intellectual concepts that sound great but have no relation to reality. To cut to the chase, this is yet another prescription to tear down existing capitalist society. What will replace it? The authors don't really say.
Do you need to read this? For most people, the answer is no, unless you really have trouble sleeping at night. EMPIRE is useless to tell you anything about how the world works. However, if you're an academic, especially in an English department, then YOU NEED THIS BOOK. Read it. Memorize it. You don't have to understand it - hell, the people who wrote it didn't understand it. Bone up on modish concepts like "biopower." At the next schmooze session pick a contemporary social problem, haul out a couple of phrases from the book, and let fly. Bingo! You're on the short track for tenure.

Rating:
Summary: Passionate thought; profound scholarship
Review: Hardt and Negri have come up with a wide-ranging, synthetic theory of the 'New World Order.' They bring together an extremely rich treatment of utopian desires in continental philosophy, the limits and possibilities of the recent 'anti-globalization' protests in Seattle, Genoa, and elsewhere, and a devastating critique of complacent neoliberal globalization.
Amardeep Singh

Rating:
Summary: Academic Automatonism
Review: Marxian automatonic dead horse beating. Jurgen Habermas is good at showing how Marxism's failures lay in it's Hegelian roots. Marx thought he could adapt Hegel's dialectical teleology minus the spiritual idealism. It's sad that Academia is so out of touch with the people beyond it's Ivory Tower.

Rating:
Summary: not for the popcorn munching, beer guzzling crowd.
Review: taking aside the maddeningly convoluted prose, the authors have a point: imperialism is over, long live the Empire. This new global world order, as they point out, is everywhere, not linked to a specific nation or place. If binLaden had read this book, he would not have tried sep11th. In fact, the Empire is protean, merely reconfigures itself after any attack, stronger than ever. Impossible to be destroyed, since everything is whithin it, it could at most, be changed through the sum of individual actions of those belonging to the multitude, which means us. Actually this is good news for the USA, since it will be integrated in a previleged position into a higher order, perennial entity, and will be spared the decline that befell other supernations, something many right wing halfwits failed to notice, as u can see by the negative reviews here. Extremely conceptual, this book shows why all the old leftist strategies no longer work. The enemy has changed, and maybe it isnt even an enemy. So lets cheer...long live the Empire! may it change to more democratic ways ( its big on B-52s and short on worlwide consensus).