Empire

Rating:
Summary: Good Cop, Bad Cop?
Review: Good? Bad? Realist? Marxist? Who Knows. Why is everyone (all the reviewers) arguing about semantics. I agree with Norman Thomas Remick's review "THE SOLUTION TO THE SITUATION IN EMPIRE". Let's deal with solutions. Like it or not, we (the USA) are what we are, and we have the chance and the virtue to do something about improving ourselves and the rest of the world. I like what Remick said!

Rating:
Summary: booooooring
Review: I have sympathy for the perspective of the authors, but that is no excuse for the turgid prose.

Rating:
Summary: a manifesto for popular globalizers from below
Review: This book is poetic, philosophical and stunning in its timeliness. It is so popular (see astonishingly high sales ratings) for the following two reasons:

1. It tells us why the corporate globalizers from above are establishing a global police regime, and it shows how this major move (note that Empire was written before Sept. 11/01) is rooted in history and is impelled by the power of people gradually coming together in a joint world project to globalize from below; and

2. Empire concludes with a manifesto for the world's popular forces which seek a positive alternative to corporate rule and despoilation. The manifesto has three demands:

a. a demand for global citizenship (coincident with the reality that there is global production, that all commodities are produced with labour in puts from all over the world, and there is vast labour migration forced and otherwise);

b. a demand for a social wage for everyone in the world (recognizing that there is now a social factory where both waged and unwaged workers contribute in a seamless web, to the making of profits); and

c. a demand for reparations, repatriation of wealth, takeback of land and more generally, the return of all that has been alienated, stolen and extracted from us.

Empire is empowering while providing a very sober explanation of the rising war state (plus allies) which is re-colonizing not just Afganistan but each citizen in each country worldwide as we see our governments pass restrictive legislation wiping out centuries of struggle for civil liberties.

Rating:
Summary: The true heirs of Marx?
Review: The authors seem to have decided on filling the shoes of Marx in the new millennium. Someone actually compared "Empire" to the Communist Manifesto, but no such luck. This astonishingly boring and badly written 512 page tome has more in common with Das Kapital, not least in its capacity to put the reader to sleep or at least drive him to drink.

The entire book is written in a wordy academic style, littered with names and catchphrases, but curiously devoid of content. In some ways it is the pol-sci undergrad paper from Hell. The authors do have some original (or at least curious) opinions, but they could easily have been put forward in a pamphlet. That however would rob this opus of its pseudo-scholarly trappings and hence of its rather bewildering popularity.

As to the actual content of this book, the mind boggles. It is none too orderly and of course much of the wording seems designed to confuse the reader, hoping to impress him in his incomprehension. Apparantly some of the words have been invented for this express purpose.

The main thrust of the book is that globalisation has created a new, universal and oppressive form of imperialism, which can be defeated only from within by the "multitude" (their term for what good old Marx called the proletariat), who will create a non-exploitative world order. This is not one of the original bits, however.

"Empire" is Hardt's and Negri's term for this transnational, supercapitalist entity which supposedly has succeeded the nation state. In order to clarify things the authors claim in their preface that Empire is "not a metaphor but a concept, which calls primarily for a theoretical approach." The reader is of course much relieved to learn this.

One of the bigger questions in the book is why capitalism has survived so long when Marx plainly stated that it wouldn't and was supported in this by innumerable supporters in academia for most of the last century. The question that dares not speak its name is of course "Why has historical necessity and inevitability not brought true Marxism to the helm?" The authors offer three possible explanations, two of them old hat and the third one incomprehensible (which suggests that the authors are responsible for it). However it never crosses their minds that Marx may have been in error. But then again the power of denial is strong.

In short this book is an immense pot-pourri of neo-Marxist pretentious drivel.

It's popularity is somewhat puzzling and some of my European friends consider it evidence of the weakness of American academia. But in today's climate one wonders whether one day in the future an American scholar will team up with Osama bin Laden in order to pen a new manifesto. After all, Empire's co-author Antonio Negri was the ideologue of the Red Brigades and still does not shy from celebrating political violence.

Recommendation: Good for insomiacs. Makes a good gift for left-wing friends (reading it either serves them right or turns them to the right).

Rating:
Summary: Prescient praxis for postmodernist proles
Review: I'm pretty surprised at the negative reviews, too. I'm not a communist or a radical academic, but one has to admit that there are some pretty on-the-nose analyses here. Like the following paragraph on "intervention:"

"Moral intervention often serves as the first act that prepares the stage for military intervention. In such cases, military deployment is presented as an internationally sanctioned police action. Today military action is progressively less a product of decisions that arise out of the old international order or even UN structures. More often it is dictated unilaterally by the US, which charges itself with the primary task and then subsequently asks its allies to set in motion a process of armed containment and/or repression of the current enemy. These enemies are most often called terrorist, a crude conceptual and terminological reduction that is rooted in police mentality."

Now before anyone goes and accuses me of supporting the terrorists or something, all I'm saying is that it describes the situation we have now (and it's written a few years ahead of time) with great precision.

To the reviewers who say "What's new here? There's nothing original!" I would point to the fact that these commies DON'T THINK GLOBALIZATION IS BAD. Or, not necessarily. I thought that was original, compared to the muddy, romantic anti-globalization left in America.

In fact, they actually claim that the failed communist Third International called global capitalism into being. Again, not something you here every day from the IMF protesters.

This is not junk, this is a well thought out piece of political theory - even if you completely disagree with the viewpoints of the authors, you should at least give these guys credit for saying something creative and smart on a piece of the political spectrum that's off the mainstream dial. And for getting published by a fancy-pants press in the process.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting but flawed
Review: Michael Hardt's and Antonio Negri's "Empire" proports to be the next big theory in philosophy after post-modernism. Drawing from a wide variety of sources, including Hobbes, Rosseau, Hegel, Foucalt and many others, Hardt and Negri try to explain the immensely complex framework of globalization in under 600 pages in complex, almost unreadable, writing.

Hardt's and Negri's thesis starts with the notion of the expanding borders of America. Through devices such as The Marshall Plan, Hardt and Negri argue that America has spread their cultural production throughout the world. This new "empire," however, is not based on physical presence of armies of imperalist countries, like the British Empire. Rather, it is based on flooding the world with neo-liberalist beliefs and structures.

Under "Empire," people are controlled through "bio-power," which is much like Foucalt's notion that enlightenment institutions socially construct humans and the way we think and act. Hardt and Negri comment that there are two essential ways to fight the impact of "Empire." The first is that people organize into "Wobbly" (Industrial Workers of the World) like bands of anarcho-syndicalists and effectively battle "Empire" at every stage. The other is on a much more personal level, and that is to reject "Empire" and its trappings of neo-liberalism materialism by following the example of St. Francis of Assisi. Through living in self-inflicted poverty, human beings can live in an alternative paradigm which rejects "Empire" and it's rampant free-market ideology.

"Empire" is certainly not a book for the "general" reader. One would have to be entrenched in academia or be an autodidact in philosophy in order to understand what Negri and Hardt write. Indeed, if one takes "Critique of Pure Reason" as a model for fluent prose stylings, then "Empire" is the book for you.

Hardt and Negri also seem to be so entrenched in their neo-marxist framework that they forgot to write about the horrors of communism. By effectively ignoring the atrocities commited under marxism, Hardt and Negri do a disservice to the left wing and to the readers by ignoring communist atrocities. In order for the left to effectively "move on" from the painful historical recollections of communist totaliarinism, books like "Empire" must effectively deal head on with the issues and not skirt them.

Rating:
Summary: Old Marxists never die, I guess
Review: Notwithstanding the events of the 90's, some of the old Marxist dicta are still swirling around in academic circles, now given an injection of Foucault's unintelligible structuralism. Anyway, hoping to understand better the events of the recent Genoa conference and anti-globalism generally, I wandered from Friedman's "Lexis and the Olive Tree" to this gray world of "Empire." Unless you are pre-disposed to a text with the word "juridical" in every other sentence, I would recommend looking elsewhere. But if you do wade through the obscure first chapter, which seeks to define the author's notion of "Empire," you do get to something of the point: Empire is everything that organizes our world, creates wealth, and protects citizens. Empire, by the way, is bad. We need a new language of discourse, say the authors, that validates and articulates all the forces that would destroy world organization. Still, if you are of the anarchist bent, this volume makes for difficult reading as a handbook. One of the authors is in jail in Italy. I'd let him out--he's harmless.

Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: Ignore the two idiots from New York. In no way does this book "embrace terrorism" -- and only someone who has not read it would say that. (Someone who has an agenda to trash the book for political reasons.) Plus, not only does "Empire" not "embrace French post-structuralism" -- whatever the heck that means -- it spends several chapters dealing with the limitations of all postmodern analysis. (So again, this comment is just more disinformation.) As to what the book is, as a read it is a slow, hard go -- because it looks at the world and the whole concept of power and empire in an entirely new way. To attempt to sum that up here would be a profanation. Buy this book and hang with it. Especially now. The last month has made the brilliance of "Empire" even more glowing and necessary.

Rating:
Summary: Imperialism Gives Way to Empire
Review: Among other insights, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have a very interesting take on the near simultaneous end in both the U.S. and Soviet Union of Fordism and the disciplinary state. They suggest it was the "multitude" in both nations (or the "proletariat" which they define as just about everybody in the age of Empire) rebelling against the industrial factory/modern project which destabilized both nations. This runs counter to the usual top-down explanations for the rise of postmodern economics (They do include the litany of usual top-down causes such as Nixon abandoning the gold standard, the challenge posed by the suddenly recompetitive economies of Germany and Japan, but the explanation of the multitude's rejection of the Fordist state gets top billing and feels more true.)

Similarly, their identification and description of the rise of the postmodern global Empire feels right, too. In one of the more compelling passages, they describe a structure that is everywhere and nowhere, ready to be activated through crisis (such as the WTC attack), a supranational structure of domination that is slowly, with each crisis, becoming more and more immanent. When George W. Bush talks about the enemies of freedom, the civilized world versus the non-civilized world the voice of empire is clearly audible. And I buy their argument that imperialism has been replaced by "Empire" as they define it. Similarly, I agree that it is time for academics to stop raking through the dead coals of imperialist history for insight into the politics of power and domination. It is the world of Empire that needs describing and destabilizing.

Written at a very high (about 30,000 feet) theoretical and rhetorical level, Negri and Hardt see and describe much. What's missing are solid recommendations for the multitude to work it's will in the world of Empire -- a program which is alluded to frequently in first half of the book, but given short shrift at the end. Nevertheless, they do to a limited extent provide those who might consider going to protest an IMF and World Bank meeting a new way to think about what's bugging them, and some positive recommendations -- such as "global citizenship" to rival "global capitalism" and a "social wage" -- that could be part of the new agenda of struggle.

Rating:
Summary: We live in History
Review: I'm surprised none of the reviewers responded to the author's embrace of terrorism. In this new world we have been unfortunately thrust into, it seems like this fact should be made known to the unsuspecting public.