The following excerpts and observations are meant to be additional to the points picked up by Geoff.
p xii: “The decline in sovereignty of nation-states, however, does not mean that sovereignty as such has declined"
p xiii: “The United States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project. Imperialism is over.”
The authors assert that there has come into being a supra-national sovereignty with the United Nations, the WTO, etc. Can one seriously believe that the UN, WTO or any such body could impose anything on the US. Ordinary Americans are experiencing things that look like the kind of thing everyone else in the world has been suffering -foreign entities imposing things on their own elected government. The WTO has forced a number of measures on the US Congress, but while US electors may be disempowered, I question whether there is any compromise to the sovereignty of the American ruling class, which uses these world bodies as and when it suits its interests. The UN can’t even get the US to pay its membership subscription, far less impose a trade blockade!
Granted, the point is to ascertain the tendency. If there is a tendency towards construction of a supranational power, then even if it is imperfect and ineffectual, then if it is becoming-dominant, then this would be important:
p.5 “On the one hand, however, this process of legitimation is effective only insofar as it transfers sovereign right to a real supranational center. It is not our intention here to criticise or lament the serious and at times tragic) inadequacies of this process; indeed we are interested in the United Nations and the project of international order not as an end in itself, but rather as a real historical lever that pushed forward the transition toward a properly global system. It is precisely the inadequacies of the process, then, that make it effective.”
However, it seems to me that the while UN and the EU are multilingual and inter-national, the real power in the world is still a monoglot and it speaks English with an American accent.
For sure it seems reasonable that capitalism is incomplete until its world market is governed by a single political authority:
p. 9 “We believe that this shift makes perfectly clear and possible today the capitalist project to bring together economic power and political power, to realize, in other words, a properly capitalist order. In constitutional terms, the processes of globalisation are no longer merely a fact but also a source of juridical definitions that tends to project a single supranational figure of political power”.
But it is one thing to anticipate this, and all the concomitant processes that might accompany such an accomplishment, another to proclaim what may turn out to be an impossibility for capitalism.
The issue of “just wars” is an interesting and topical one:
p. 10: “And in order to achieve these ends, the single power is given the necessary force to conduct, when necessary, “just wars” at the borders against the barbarians and internally against the rebellious.”
p. 13: “The resurrection of the concept of just war may be only a symptom of the emergence of Empire, but what a suggestive and powerful one!
but it seems to me that the analysis which was common after the Gulf War, that the issue was simply the problem of having only one superpower, rather than of having a genuinely “new world order” remains more convincing.
p. 11-12: “The fundamental alternative between these two notions ran throughout all of European modernity, including the two great ideologies that defined its mature phase: the liberal ideology that rests on the peaceful concert of juridical forces and its supersession in the market; and the socialist ideology that focuses on international unity through the organisation of struggles and the supersession of right.
“Would it be correct to claim, then, that these two different developments of the notion of right that persisted side by side through the centuries of modernity tend towards being united and presented as a single category? We suspect that this is indeed the case, and that in postmodernity the notion of right should be understood again in terms of the concept of Empire”
So post-modernity has overcome the “old” opposition between market capitalism and socialism!!! Tell me another one!
p. 15: “Empire is not born of its own will but rather it is called into being and constituted on the basis of its capacity to resolve conflicts. Empire is formed and its intervention becomes juridically legitimate only when it is already inserted into the chain of international consensuses aimed at resolving existing conflicts.”
Nice idea.
Help!
§1.1 looks like good ol’ common sense alongside §1.2. I had a glance forward at §1.3 and I think it gets better, but in this section you have to read several pages of absolute garbage to get one interesting paragraph, usually out of any context.
“Biopolitical society"!: I've discovered that you don’t have to know what this means, it makes just as much sense if you actually just skip over the word “biopolitical” wherever it appears. I was wondering whether it meant the politics of the plant and animal world, or whether it referred to politics in the whole biosphere, including society, or maybe it referred to one’s bodily functions as opposed to social phenomena. The quote from Foucault didn’t “clear it up":
p. 27. [Quoting Foucault]: “The control of society over individuals is not conducted only through consciousness or ideology, but also in the body and with the body. For capitalist society biopolitics is what is most important, the biological, the somatic, the corporeal”
p. 29: “The central role previously occupied by the labor power of mass factory workers in the production of surplus value is today increasingly filled by intellectual, immaterial, and communicative labor power.”
p. 41: “... an extension of bureaucratic power that is adapted physologically to the biopolitical context ...”
So I assume we are talking about poisoning the water supply and so on.
[The something close to a definition is implied on p. 64:
“The postmodern situation is eminently paradoxical when it is considered from the biopolitical point of view — understood, that is, as an uninterrupted circuit of life, production, and politics, globally dominated by the capitalist mode of production."]
Some un-named “Italian Marxists who talk about purely intellectual production are criticised because they emphasise this production as knowledge.
p29: “One of the most serious shortcomings has thus been the tendency among these authors to treat the new labouring process in — society only in their intellectual and incorporeal aspects. The productivity of bodies and the value of affect, however, are absolutely central in this context.”
Impossible to say whether this accusation is justified since the writers remain un-named and are not quoted, but I guess we've all come across this philosophical version of “movies about Hollywood”. Negri and Hardt instead seem to emphasise communication as the essential aspect of this postmodern productive activity which forms the basis for the new situation:
p.33: “the legitimation of the imperial machine is born at least in part of the communications industries ..."
”... we must consider communication and the — context coexistent ...”
p. 33: “If communication is one of the hegemonic sectors of production and acts over the entire — field, then we must consider communication and — the context coexistent.”
p34. “In this coincidence of production through language, the linguistic production of reality, and the language of self-validation resides a fundamental key to understanding the effectiveness, validity, and legitimation of imperial right”
I think all this confusion which has arisen in the past four decades since the decline of manufacturing, is it “all a text”, is it “a knowledge economy”, is it “communicative action”, “the communication society”, ... is simply picking one or another aspect of the simple point: it is the activity itself — “living immaterial labour” (p. 29) — rather than the product which is the essence of production and value. That’s my opinion.
I find it exasperating that this stuff is regarded so highly:
p24. “Disciplinarity fixed individuals within institutions but did not succeed in consuming them completely... etc”
Institutions fix individuals. Looked at from outside (or looking back from the present to the past) any society appears to be intruding into its individuals, if we naively assume that the individuals are really just like us, and foreign to the institutions of their own times. Good old human nature.
p. 25: “Civil society is absorbed in the state ...”
Which century is this?
p. 28: “By structuralist epistemology here we mean the re-invention of a functionalist analysis ...”
If Structuralism = functionalism why bother with either of these concepts in the first place?
Then we have:
“a properly post-structuralist understanding — that renews materialist thought and grounds itself solidly in the question of production and social being”
I think I would have used almost any word other than “materialist” to describe poststructuralism.
p. 29 “Marxian concept of ‘general intellect’ ..”
What on Earth is this an allusion to?!
I sympathise with:
p. 32: “There is nothing, no “naked life”, no external standpoint, that can be posed outside this field permeated by money; nothing escapes money”
but the position is of course exaggerated. If there was no outside to money, then we're stuck with capitalism forever. It comes to the same thing actually as “nothing outside the text”.
Surprising blast at NGOs, likened to the missionaries of by-gone colonial times! (p. 36)
Interesting stuff about how “empire” is called into being to resolve conflicts, especially ethnic conflicts. Also interesting stuff about the criminalisation of “mafias”, the drug trade and “ethnic terrorists”. (p. 37) leading up to more stuff about “the just war effectively supported by the moral police”.
One of those “you-can’t-critique-me” manoeuvres which really annoys me:
p. 40: “We are now in a position to address the question whether on the basis of these new — remises, the figure and the life of Empire can today be grasped in terms of a juridical model. We have already seen that this juridical model cannot be constituted by the existing structures of international law ..."
"In the genesis of Empire there is indeed a rationality at work that can be recognised not so much in terms of the juridical tradition but more clearly in the often hidden history of industrial management and the political use of technology ...”
but right in the beginning (p. 9), we set off exactly in that idealist direction:
“Juridical transformations effectively point toward changes in the material constitution of world power and order”
What is “rhizomatic” (“a nonhierarchical and noncentred network structure” — p. 299) and “machinic"?
The final words of the section:
“In Empire and its regime -, economic production and political constitution tend increasingly to coincide”
Now I think this is a real issue. It just annoys me that a short sentence of real content is just dropped in, out of context, without justification or derivation, at the end of the section!
I see that this book is written in the form of a classical musical composition. We have had the Prelude, the first and second movement of the First Concerto, and now we come to the third movement in which the theme suggested in the first movement is played out in much clearer outline.
p. 43: “One might even say that the construction of Empire and its global networks is a response to the various struggles against the modern machines of power, and specifically to class struggle driven by the multitude’s desire for liberation. The multitude called Empire into being.”
p. 47: “It is a question of transforming a necessity imposed on the multitude — a necessity that was to a certain extent solicited by the multitude itself through modernity as a line of flight from localised misery and exploitation — into a condition of possibility of liberation, a new possibility on this terrain of humanity.”
Aside from anything else, the word “multitude” is being used without justification or explanation; but here it is used apparently as a synonym for the working class, because one can only make sense of this assertion by interpreting as referring to the capitalists’ struggle to reduce labour costs. Is it meant in the sense of the famous aphorism the class struggle as “the immediate driving force of history"?
p. 43: “Despite recognising all this, we insist on asserting that the construction of Empire is a step forward in order to do away with any nostalgia for the power structures that preceded it and refuse any political strategy that involves returning to that old arrangement, such as trying to resurrect the nation-states to protect against global capital.”
One has to agree.
p. 44 “the left ... has sought to recompose sites of resistance that are founded on the identities of social subjects or national and regional groups, often grounding political analysis on localisation of struggles. Such arguments are sometimes constructed as “place-based” movements or politics, in which the boundaries of place (conceived either as identity or as territory) are posed against the undifferentiated and homogeneous space of global networks.
This an astute and convincing observation, but how can it be otherwise?
p. 45 “Globalisation, like localisation, should be understood instead as a regime of the production of identity and difference, ... It is false, in any case, to claim that we can (re)establish local identities that are in some way outside and protected against the global flows of capital and Empire.”
True!
p. 45 “The strategy of local resistance misidentifies and thus masks the enemy.”
p. 47. “the first [methodological approach] is critical and deconstructive, aiming to subvert the hegemonic languages and social structures and thereby reveal an alternative ontological basis that resides in the creative and productive practices of the multitudes; the second is constructive and ethico-political, seeking to lead the processes of the production of subjectivity toward the constitution of an effective social, political alternative, a new constitutive power.”
p. 48. “The critical approach is thus intended to bring to light the contradictions, cycles, and crises of the process because in each of these moments the imagined necessity of the historical development can open towards alternative possibilities.”
p. 48 “This [second] approach breaks methodologically with every philosophy of history insofar as it refuses any deterministic conception of historical development and any “rational” celebration of the result. It demonstrates, on the contrary, how the historical event resides in potentiality.”
“Philosophy is not the owl of Minerva that takes flight after history has been realised in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to the event.”
p. 49. “’the proletariat has no country’ ... the utopia expressed in these slogans is in fact not really internationalist, ... Rather, proletarian internationalism was anti-nationalist, and hence supranational and global”
Attractive proposition but not true, I think. “Inter-national” does not mean “inter-(national government)”. Working class solidarity has always been solidarity extended from one group of workers to another via nationally based organisations or organised by international organisations such as the Comintern, which showed themselves to have the same character, based on the forces created in one national revolution. Negri and Hardt seem here to be skirting around the elusive problem of making the transition from inter-national to global politics by saying that the transition has already been achieved.
p. 50: “International solidarity had to be recognised not as an act of charity or altruism ... but rather as proper to and inseparable from each national proletariat’s own desire and struggle for liberation.”
p. 52: “Does that same uncontainable desire for freedom that broke and buried the nation-state and that determined the transition toward Empire still lived beneath the ashes of the present, the ashes of the fire that consumed the internationalist proletarian subject that was centred on the industrial working class? What has come to stand in the place of the subject?”
Good question! The insertion of the word “industrial” is surely a rhetorical device; one could have said “working class of the 19th and early 20th centuries” in which case the answer “working class of this time” follows obviously. The point is only to identify that section of the proletariat which is playing the leading role and what it is struggling to do.
p. 52: “In conceptual terms we understand proletariat as a broad category that includes all those whose labour is directly or indirectly exploited by and subjected to capitalist norms of production and reproduction.
I think I can agree with that, but it’s vague and subject to all sorts of misuse with the combination of “indirect” and the vagueness of “exploited” and “capitalist norms”.
“In a previous era the category of the proletariat centred on and was at times effectively subsumed under the industrial working class, whose paradigmatic figure was the mass factory worker. That industrial working class was often accorded the leading role over other figures of labour (such as peasant labour and reproductive labour) in both economic analyses and political movements. Today that working class has all but disappeared from view. “
I'm concerned here. Undoubtedly the labour process and the composition of the working class has changed, and these changes must lie at the centre of revolutionary strategic thinking. In the dominant capitalist nations, the industrial working class has become less well organised, has lost its dominant position in working class and left politics and is relatively marginal to the interests of capital, which relies on manufacture in cheap-labour sources in other countries. In those other countries, the industrial working class has still not achieved the level of organisation which the factory workers achieved in Europe a long time ago. I am interested in how these “knowledge workers” could seize public political power; I tend to think the industrial workers will be needed for that, though they may not be “mass” “factory” workers.
“It has not ceased to exist, but it has been displaced from its privileged position in the capitalist economy and its hegemonic position in the class composition of the proletariat. The proletariat is not what it used to be, but that does not mean it has vanished. It means, rather, that we are faced once again with the analytic task of understanding the new composition of the proletariat as a class.”
Yes.
“The fact that under the category of proletariat we understand all those exploited by and subject to capitalist domination should not indicate that the proletariat is a homogeneous or undifferentiated unit. It is indeed cut through in various directions by differences and stratifications. Some labour is waged, some is not; some labour is restricted to within the factory walls, some is dispersed across the unbounded social terrain; some labour is limited to eight hours a day and forty hours a week, some expands to fill the entire time of life; some labour is accorded a minimal value, some is exalted to the pinnacle of the capitalist economy.”
“We will argue that among the various figures of production active today, the figure of immaterial labour power (involved in communication, cooperation, and the production and reproduction of affects) occupies an increasingly central position in both the schema of capitalist production and the composition of the proletariat. Our point here is that all of these diverse forms of labour are in some way subject to capitalist discipline and capitalist relations of production. This fact of being within capital and sustaining capital is what defines the proletariat as a class.”
I think the definition of the proletariat is OK. I have a question about all those doing factory work in the “enterprise zones” who are not yet organised, but will probably become organised, though it appears to be a truth that at the moment they do not hold a “central position”; and I question the prominence given to “immaterial labour”. Hardt and Negri here are speaking for this layer of “immaterial labourers”. Back in 1968, Negri was saying more or less the same thing in relation to the French student movement. I think the point is that all labour power is “immaterial”.
p. 54: “an international cycle of struggles based on the communication and translation of the common desires of labour in revolt seems no longer to exist ... we can recognise powerful events on the world scene that reveal the trace of the multitude’s refusal of exploitation and that signal a new kind of proletarian solidarity and militancy.”
p. 54: “... in our much celebrated age of communication, struggles have become all but incommunicable”
Nice point. Making struggles communicable is a problem worth focusing on. But I question this picture of the contrast between past and present. Nevertheless there is a contrast to be discussed. Quite apart from, for example, the period 1944-49 when national liberation struggles were all in flux because of a number of shared international conditions, there is a chain of “mutual inspiration” in which the young Negri was at the centre, and I guess that’s what he has in mind.
p. 56: “First, each struggle, though firmly rooted in local conditions, leaps immediately to the global level and attacks the imperial constitution in its generality. Second, all the struggles destroy the traditional distinction between economic and political struggles.”
Nice again.
“One such obstacle is the absence of a recognition of a common enemy against which the struggles are directed.”
“A second obstacle, which is really corollary to the first, is that there is no common language of each into a cosmopolitan language. ... communication of singularities”
Nice.
p. 58: “In the constitution of Empire there is no longer an “outside” to power and thus no longer weak links — if by weak links we mean an external point where the articulation of global power are vulnerable ... the virtual centre of Empire can be attacked from any point”.
Nice again, though exaggerated.
p. 60: “The juridical process and the imperial machine are always subject to contradictions and crises.”
p 61: “It becomes ever more difficult for Empire to intervene in the unforeseeable temporal sequences of events when they accelerate their temporality”.
p. 63: “... both strategic and tactical, when the two are no longer different”.
p. 66: “Today a manifesto, a political discourse, should aspire to fulfil a Spinozist prophetic function, the function of an immanent desire that organises the multitude. There is not finally here any determinism or utopia: this is rather a radical counterpower, ontologically grounded not on any “vide pour le futur” but on the actual activity of the multitude, its creation, production, and power — a materialist teleology.”
Negri and Hardt place a lot of emphasis in characterising the current global configuration in terms of the centrality of “immaterial labour power”.
p. 29: “The central role previously occupied by the labor power of mass factory workers in the production of surplus value is today increasingly filled by intellectual, immaterial, and communicative labor power.”
p. 34: “In this coincidence of production through language, the linguistic production of reality, and the language of self-validation resides a fundamental key to understanding the effectiveness, validity, and legitimation of imperial right.”
p. 52: “We will argue that among the various figures of production active today, the figure of immaterial labour power (involved in communication, cooperation, and the production and reproduction of affects) occupies an increasingly central position in both the schema of capitalist production and the composition of the proletariat.”
In a 1964 work, Negro waxed lyrical about the students as “socialised workers” and like many of his time saw the students in much the same light as he now casts the knowledge workers, occupying a “central position” in both production and revolution. The “information economy” has now entered the common parlance, whereas in 1964, there could have been no conception of the extent to which the production and exchange of knowledge and images has become central to capitalist development.
If we grant that workers who produce images, designs, programs, data, etc., now occupy a much greater place in production and in the political life of the proletariat than they once did, we need to know why. In the first place, we need to know what Negri and Hardt suggest by way of explanation.
Which leads me to turn to ...
p. 281: “When agriculture came under the domination of industry, even when agriculture was still predominant in quantitative terms, it became subject to the social and financial pressures of industry, and moreover agricultural production itself was industrialised.”
this is a nice observation, on reflection obvious, but nice.
p. 285: “Services ... jobs for the most part are highly mobile and involve flexible skills. More important, they are characterised in general by the central role played by knowledge, information, affect, and communication. In this sense many call the post-industrial economy an informational economy.” ...
“Just as the processes of industrialisation transformed agriculture and made it more productive, so too the informational revolution will transform industry by redefining and rejuvenating manufacturing processes. The new managerial imperative here is, “Treat manufacturing as a service” In effect, as industries are transformed, the division between manufacturing and services is becoming blurred. Just as through the process of modernisation all production tended to become industrialised, so too through the process of postmodernisation all production tends toward the production of services, toward becoming informationlised.” ...
Two models or paths to informatisation:
p. 286: “The first path tends towards a service economy model [US, UK, Canada]. This model involves a rapid decline in industrial jobs and a corresponding rise in service jobs. In particular, the financial services that manage capital come to dominate the other service sectors. In the second model, the info-industrial model, [Japan, Germany] industrial employment declines more slowly ... informatisation is closely integrated into and serves to reinforce the strength of existing industrial production. “
p. 288: “modernisation no longer the key to economic advancement”
p. 289: “we need to look more closely to see clearly the changes in our notion of the human and in humanity itself that emerge in the passage toward an informational economy”
“Today information and communication have come to play a foundational role in production processes”
“A first aspect is the change from the Fordist model to the Toyotist model”
“The primary structural change between these two models involves the system of communication between the production and consumption of commodities, that is, the passage of information between the factory and the market.”
p. 290: “... an impoverished notion of communication as the mere transmission of market data.
"The service sectors of the economy present a richer model of productive communication. Most services indeed are based on the continual exchange of information and knowledges. Since the production of services results in no material and durable good, we define the labor involved in this production as immaterial labor — that is, labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication.”
p. 291: “The increasingly extensive use of computers has tended progressively to redefine laboring practices and relations, along with, indeed, all social practices and relations.”
“’symbolic-analytical services’ — tasks that involve ‘problem solving, problem-identifying and strategic brokering activities’. This type of labour claims the highest value. ... key to competitiveness in the new global economy ... growth of these knowledge-based jobs of creative symbolic manipulation implies a corresponding growth of low-value and low-skill jobs of routine symbol manipulation, such as data entry and word processing. Here begins to emerge a fundamental division of labour within the realm of immaterial production.”
p. 292: the computerisation of production, then, labor tends toward the position of abstract labor.
“The model of the computer, however, can account for only one face of the communicational and immaterial labour involved in the production of services. The other face of immaterial labour is the affective labor of human contact and interaction. Health services, ...”
We are here making a categorical slide. This category is normally called “the service sector”. There is nothing in the nature of labour in this sector which is specific to the sector; it is not “immaterial” or “material”, it is just the way the transaction takes place, the way the commodity relation inserts itself into the labour process which is specific. Caring is an activity as old as time itself, but it has only recently been made the subject of exchange. Communication, problem-solving, design and image-making are likewise very ancient kinds of labour, but the proportion of social labour devoted to these activities has increased because of changes in the labour process itself.
p.293: “In short, we can distinguish three types of immaterial labor that drive the service sector at the top of the informational economy. The first is involved in an industrial production that has been informationalised and has incorporated communication technologies in a way that transforms the production process itself. Manufacturing is regarded as a service, and the material labour of the production of durable goods mixes with and tends toward immaterial labor. Second is the immaterial labor of analytical and symbolic tasks, which itself breaks down into creative and intelligent manipulation on the one hand and routine symbolic tasks on the other. Finally, a third type of immaterial labor involves the production and manipulation of affect and requires (virtual or actual) human contact, labor in the bodily mode. These are three types of labor that drive the postmodernsation of the global economy.”
Again it is confusing to call this collection of forms of labour “immaterial”; the example of the first type tells it all — good old manufacture under a different aspect. The same is true of the others, but this masks differences.
p. 294: “cooperation is completely immanent to the laboring actiivty itself. This fact calls into question the old notion (common to classical and Marxian political economics) by which labour power is conceived as “variable capital”, that is, a force that is activated and made coherent only by capital, because the cooperative powers of labor power (particularly immaterial labor power) afford labor the possibility of valorising itself. Brains and bodies still need others to produce value, but the others they need are not necessarily provided by capital and its capacities to orchestrate production. Today productivity, wealth, and the creation of social surpluses take the form of cooperative interactivity through linguistic, communicational, and affective networks. In the expression of its own creative energies, immaterial labor thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism’.
Begins with a true and important statement. I think the problem or the tension in the concepts of marxism is wrongly identified though. What is capital? I think it remains true that labour power “is activated and made coherent only by capital, because the cooperative powers of labor power ... afford labor the possibility of valorising itself”, but it is the fetishistic conception of capital as a pile of stuff which needs to be abandoned, but Negri and Hardt counterpose to capital “cooperative interactivity through linguistic, communicational, and affective networks” without considering that in fact it is these very forms that constitute capital. Thus the completely false conclusion of the potential for “spontaneous communism” within this same bourgeois society!
p. 297: “The centralization of control, however, is even more clear from a global perspective ...”
True, and growing apace.
p. 300: “The networks of the new information infrastructure are a hybrid of these two models. Just as in a previous era Lenin and other critics of imperialism recognised a consolidation of international corporations into quasi-monopolies (over railways, banking, electric power, and the like), today we are witnessing a competition among transnational corporations to establish and consolidate quasi-monopolies over new information infrastructure ... Hollywood, MicroSoft, IBM, AT&T, ...”
yes.
p. 301: “... public property, however, was soon reappropriated in private hands. In each process the communal possession, which is considered natural,. is transformed at public expense into a second and third nature that functions finally for private profit ... continuous cycle ...”
Very astute observation!!
p. 302: “Our economic and social reality is defined less by the material objects that are made and consumed than by co-produced services and relationships ...”
Yes. It’s called [collaborative] activity or social labour.
“Private property, despite its juridical powers, cannot help becoming an ever more abstract and transcendental concept and thus ever more detached from reality.”
Yes!
“There is no other way to construct concepts than to work in a common way”
Yes!
p. 303: “The commons is the incarnation, the production, and the liberation of the multitude.”
Now hold on! “IS"? “is the basis for” or something, but not yet “is” surely?
Andy