Empire State Building
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire has been quite the strange little publishing sensation – making a hitherto obscure professor of comparative literature at Duke University into a source of interest for the Sunday supplements, and providing a late flush of success for everyone’s favourite imprisoned radical Italian Spinoza scholar. The success of the book is such as to suggest that here, perhaps, we have a revolutionary socialist counterpart to Stephen Hawking’s much-bought (though little-read) work, A Brief History of Time. In Empire, one might suggest, we have the very first fair trade coffee table book.
Hailed by some as the most important leftist tract for a generation, some excitable commentators have gone so far as to announce that we have found a Communist Manifesto for the twenty-first century. From the communes of Christiana to the common rooms of Cambridge, from the bookshops of Boston to the bordellos of Bratislava, Empire has been received with enthusiasm and hope by a beleaguered International Left. It has generated discussion and debate from the drinking holes of Detroit to the delicatessens of Dar es Salaam, from the coffee shops of Cairo to the canteens of Canton. Empire has held the promise of a sophisticated Leftist response to globalization, hoped for in Havana, desired in Delhi, needed in Nagoya, feared in Frankfurt. From the to the sweatshops of Shanghai to the sexshops of St. Pauli, from the beaches of Belize to the building sites of Birmingham, Empire seems to many to be the last best hope of holding on to the joy of being communist. From Anchorage to Andorra, from Tasmania to Terra del Fuego, from Jerusalem to Johannesburg and from Ulaanbator to Uttar Pradesh, the hope exists that Hardt and Negri have found the key to how it is that we can best be socialists after Seattle.
My own engagement with the book, though, came as a bit of a disappointment. It started with an optimism of the will, but derailed through a pessimism of the intellect. The book is written in such a way as to make it deeply unpalatable for anyone with a training in analytic political philosophy. It foams with episodes of indecipherable pomo bullshit, often revelling in allusiveness over determinacy. I may not know much, but I’m sure that fuzzy thinking is not the way of the future for the Left. The capitalists don’t do it, and neither should we. This fuzziness has some rather baleful effects – it allows us to project whatever we like into the book, so it becomes a hopeful social cypher rather than a proper work of political theory. This would have some utility, but it would be of a rather limited variety.
But, fear not, dear reader, for the way to stop worrying and love Empire is at hand. Comrade Guinan’s magnificent review of the book, available in this very Symposium, presents a cogent and coherent guide to what is living and what is useful within its pages. If, like me, you just switch off when you read an argument which relies for its force on the wilful abuse of the concepts it contains, then Guinan can serve as a helpful and courageous guide through the territory: a Sherpa to carry the post-modern baggage, a bodyguard to jump in the way of the fuzzy-thinking bullets. Empire certainly doesn’t work in theory, but it might just be OK in practice.
First, though, a rant: the key term of the fist half of Empire is "sovereignty". This word is connected with the way we think about the normative authority of a political body or system. We say that the Crown in Parliament is sovereign, or that the American people are sovereign. Tweedy Tories worry about transferring sovereignty to the institutions of the EU – and what they worry about when they do so worry is that political authority is to be transferred from the Westminster Parliament to the Peripatetic Parliament which patrols the Franco-Luxembourgeois border. But Hardt and Negri, when they talk about sovereignty, are not talking about legislative or juridical authority, but social, economic and political power. "Empire", which is their name for the emerging global capitalist totality, is accused of embodying a new form of "sovereignty". But this seems precisely wrong. What "Empire" embodies is a form of political power which doesn’t give a stuff about sovereignty at all. When I break into your house and steal your toaster, I exercise a certain sort of power over you, but I don’t constitute a new form of sovereignty over you. This must be obvious to Hardt and Negri as much as it is to anyone else, in which case I am simply mystified by what the concept is meant to be doing in their work, or why they insist that they are theorizing about "sovereignty" at all. Mais, c’est la vie.
A couple of quick remarks follow. But I wouldn’t waste time on them. Instead, go and read Comrade Guinan’s article now. Then, forewarned and forearmed, with a pinch of salt but a bucket of optimism, read Empire.
§1. I once read a profile of Michael Hardt in The Guardian (or, it may have been The Observer), written by the usually highly commendable Ed Vuillamy (who has gone from being the British media’s most heartfelt and incisive commentator on the wars of the former Yugoslavia to being its most insightful American correspondent). It was both gushing in its praise for Hardt, and devoid of any proper explanation of what he actually thought. This is exactly how the papers used to deal with people like Hawking and Roger Penrose. Though not in any way definitive in its implications, it was clear that the implications were not good.
§2. It is absurd to say, as Empire does, that "The United States does not, and indeed no nation state can today, form the centre of an imperialist project." (p. xiv). Of course it’s true to say that we’ve entered an era which is in many ways post-nationalist, but never write off the influence of an entity which ploughs countless billions of dollars into buying economic and military power. Such things are rarely done simply for a laugh.
§3. States are still phenomenally powerful. Even smaller ones, by which I mean not just the USA. Think what France has managed to do (not the happiest example, perhaps, but the point stands), and which Britain has not (proper transport, a higher social wage, saner working conditions). And that has been achieved without especially exciting politics or politicians. Much of what is commonly taken to be the weakness of states is actually the weakness of politicians.
§4. Take the relation between global capital and states. The individual actors of global capital co-ordinate seamlessly and naturally, as they all want the same things and states want to give it to them. States, on the other hand, compete to give global capital just what it wants. There’s a huge co-ordination problem, but also a problem whereby even middle-sized states don’t see their own bargaining position for what it is. Both of these problems have solutions, or can have. Neither need involve the supersession of the nation state as an important unit of political organization.
