Empire [check american spellings should remain in quotes, ie. 'labor'] 'Empire is materialising before our very eyes' (2000: xi) is the opening sentence of this much discussed book describing contemporary forms of sovereignty. Empire is the term that they ascribe to this new form - composed of 'national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule' (2000: xii). Empire is rule-based undoubtedly but its rules are complex and express a world order (an order 'expressed as a juridicial formation', 2000: 3). Capitalist sovereignty now operates through the relays and networks of relations of domination, no longer reliant on a single centre of power or crude hierarchy. Crucially, though, this does not mean that the imperial apparatus is not unified (2000: 341). The coming of empire as Hardt and Negri see it, develops out of changed (and changing) economic and cultural exchanges, and distinguishes it from previous forms that relied on imperialisms and the declining sovereignty of nation-states. Empire fundamentally changes the map as it requires no fixed territorial centre of power. In this new world map, the periphery and centre are thoroughly embedded in eachother (first world in third world and third world in first world) - look at any major city for evidence of this (although it has to be said that this was also the case at the turn of the last century when Jack London commented on the extreme poverty and misery at the heart of the greatest Empire at that time, in The People of the Abyss, London: Journeyman Press, first published 1903; his 'reportage' set in the East End of London). With no centre of power (was it always a myth?), it is difficult to identify the imperialist mechanism (or class enemy). No nation state can any longer hold such a pivotal position, even the United States of America is only mistakenly identified as the centre of an imperialist project. 'American imperialism' may be prevalent and there is no denying the powerful position that the USA occupies, but Hardt and Negri contest that it is no longer possible to act imperialistically (from the basis of nation-state) as European powers previously operated. On the contrary, Empire is a: 'decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command' (2000: xii-xiii. Note: I kept the American spelling for effect). This is Hardt and Negri's concept of Empire that they attempt to theorise. Essentially, this sounds rather like a description of the latest capitalist mode of production as it opens up the global market - capitalist globalisation, in other words. They emphasise that the processes of globalisation are not 'unified or univocal' that might be understood and redirected: 'Our political task... is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganise them and redirect them towards new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organisation of global flows and exchanges' (2000: xv). Thus, they reveal their militant anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation tendencies. The myth of neo-liberal globalisation is that it is somehow natural and neutral, merely arising spontaneously from conditions, its sense of order merely responsive to autonomous economic and cultural change. Yet, however much it can be said to be a project, it is not simply a centred, rational 'conspiracy' (they call this the 'conspiracy theory of globalisation'). Importantly, the globalisation of capitalist production and its world market are constituted differently according to Hardt and Negri. Although capitalism has always been global (and this has been my argument thus far - that history reveals the continuum), they claim a significant rupture in capitalist production and relations of power, to realise: 'a properly capitalist order. In constitutional terms, the processes of globalisation are no longer merely a fact but also a source of juridicial definitions that tends to project a single supranational figure of political power. [...] a new inscription of authority and a new design of the production of norms and legal instruments of coercion that guarantee contracts and resolve conflicts.' (2000: 9) There is plenty of evidence for this machine of authority legitimating its actions, even in the short time since the publication of the book itself (completed between the Gulf war and war in Kosova, before so-called terrorist attacks on New York and Afghanistan). Thus unfolds the 'new world order' that is dynamic, fluid and entirely flexible. Hardt and Negri claim 'the new paradigm is both system and hierarchy', in shorthand as a hybrid of Luhmann's systems theory and Rawls's theory of justice (2000: 13-14). This demonstrates the structural logic of "governance without government" (this is the title of a book by Rosenau and Czempiel, quoted in Hardt and Negri, 2000: 14), operating through apparent consensus but masking a systemic violence. In terms that seem to prefigure Bush/Blair's 'axis of evil': 'Empire is emerging today as the centre that supports the globalisation of productive networks and casts its widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within its world order - and yet at the same time it deploys a powerful police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves who threaten its order.' (2000: 20) In recent times, the 'police' have been acting like the fascists they are commonly labelled. globalisation: Hardt and Negri argue for a 'counterglobalisation', a counter-Empire' in recognition of its utopian spirit, as opposed to an isolationist rejection of globalisation. By implication, this is simultaneously a rejection of capitalism's abuses: 'The bizarre naturalness of capitalism is a pure and simple mystification, and we have to disabuse ourselves of it right away' (2000: 386-7). Even global capitalist development for Marx and his followers could bring about positive change and in suggesting new forms of freedom (from previous domineering precapitalist regimes and from the ravages of capitalism itself). Perhaps this is not so hard to imagine in the context of slavery, that flourished and developed new forms under early capitalism (despite its logic being antithetical to wage labour, however impoverished). Slave labour was a kind of apprenticeship to factory exploitation. Thus, (despite the undoubted eurocentrism in Marx) capitalism sets the tone for change in its use of global networks and exchange. Hardt and Negri argue that reality is not simply dialectical but colonialism is (as it is produced artificially). Despite having no basis in nature (is this arguable?), Fanon effectively employed this Hegelian dialectical relation between master and slave. The logic proceeds as follows: the dialectic reveals the artificiality and denaturalisation of the relation; making clear that this is a result of violent struggle that should be renewed as this articulates power from one to the other (coloniser to colonised); lastly, 'posing colonialism as a negative dialectic of recognition makes clear the potential for subversion inherent in the situation. For a thinker like Fanon [in Black Skin, White Masks], the reference to Hegel suggests that the Master can only achieve a hollow form of recognition; it is the Slave, through life-and-death struggle, who has the potential to move forward to full consciousness. The dialectic ought to imply movement, but this dialectic of European sovereign identity has fallen back into stasis. The failed dialectic suggests the possibility of a proper dialectic that through negativity will move history forward.' (2000:129) The brand of negative dialectics might be called the project of anti-racism of course, as a strategy better suited than multiculturalism (I need that Zizek quote here). Hardt and Negri have problems with this dialectical logic as they see it as illusory - Fanon thinks counterviolence only can lead to liberation and any other sense of freedom will be spurious freedom. Their argument is that this does not lead to synthesis only counter-antagonism. That this simply prepares the ground for politics but at this point is not politics in itself. This may be the case, but how does this sit with their call for counter-globalisation? (calling it 'counter-' rather than 'anti-globalisation') And how is this to be achieved (in the context of the alleged militancy of Negri)? There are severe contradictions here but they are right to point to when the real struggle takes place - after the revolution - and on the thorny issue of a conclusive synthesis or not. They point to the example that the end of colonialisation has not brought about freedom but yielded new forms of rule that they call Empire (the counter argument would simply be this is a further stage of imperialism under capitalism). These issues of race are further compounded as racism is no longer defined through biological terms but cultural terms too - producing a new racism that Balibar calls a 'differentialist racism, a racism without race' (2000: 192; referring to ƒtienne Balibar's 'Is There a Neo-Racism?', in, Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, London: Verso, 1991: 21). This echoes Deleuze and Guattari's contention that racism does not operate through exclusion and binaries, but through 'differential inclusion' (2000: 193). complicit theory However, I am more convinced when they question whether postmodernism and postcolonialism actually serve and reinforce the new strategies of rule. They simply question whether the new paradigm of power has 'come to replace the modern paradigm and rule through differential hierarchies of the hybrid and fragmentary subjectivities that these theorists celebrate' (2000:138). This seems without question to my mind that these are at least 'effects', and I would further support the more extreme position of Arif Dirlik in calling these thinkers the 'intelligentsia of global capitalism' (from The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Boulder: Westview Press 1997: 77, quoted in Hardt and Negri, 2000: 138). Far from eliminating master narratives as is argued in orthodox postmodernism, it is argued that these (and especially those narratives of ideology; by ideology, I mean those ideas that are superstructural, external to production) are enhanced and reproduced in order to legitimate its own power base. Even groups that appear to operate on the moral high ground acting for human rights and relief work, ultimately serve the purpose of Empire, and work to its logic of identifying privation and sin (Oxfam, Amnesty International, MŽdicins sans frontires, for instance - sometimes called non-government organisations; NGOs are what Hardt and Negri describe as 'the community face of neoliberalism', 2000: 313). This is extended to the police mentality of the United States in its unilateral 'preventative strikes', 'terrorist' activity - with or without the backing of the UN - these actions arise out of the same logic and expression of the so-called new world order. Although these power operations might be described as virtual, they have real consequences and effects both in the centre and on the margins (the distinction actually makes little sense in this connection). 'Empire thus appears in the form of a very high-tech machine: it is virtual, built to control the marginal event, and organised to dominate and when necessary intervene in the breakdowns of the system (in line with the most advanced technologies of robotic production).'(2000: 39) It is a dynamic, 'globalised biopolitical machine' (2000: 40) wherein social production is enacted drawing together economic production, politics and subjectivity. They maintain this is a more productive reconception of politics than Hannah Arendt's concept of 'political space' taken up in academia (for instance, Craig Calhoun and John McGowan, eds., Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997. biopolitical production and immaterial labour: The mode of production has transformed wherein industrial factory labour has become less significant and 'communicative, cooperative and affective labour' more significant - what Hardt and Negri call 'biopolitical production'. Importantly, this does not contradict but aligns with Marx's emphasis on the mode of production: 'The realm of production is where social inequalities are clearly revealed and, moreover, where the most effective resistances and alternatives to the Empire arise' (2000: xvii.). To define this power base more closely as plural and multiple (and not centred), they draw upon Michel Foucault's concept of biopower where power is decidedly not centred (and where disciplinary power is exerted on the subject's body and consciousness, and thus across social relations too) and Gilles Deleuze and FŽlix Guattari's thousand plateaus that describes the paradox of power (from A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, where even resistance is disrupted - no longer marginal but active in the centre and expressed in networks). Both analyses offer little in terms of resistance, power is dispersed but ultimately all powerful, adapting to change and circumstance. In the case of Deleuze and Guattari, social reproduction is described as chaotic and indeterminable. If it cannot be grasped, how can it be resisted? This is where the idea of biopower becomes significant, operating in the tradition of materialist production and the ways in which subjectivities (bodies and consciousness) are constituted through production (extending crude Marxist orthodoxy and economic determinism for an additional recognition of culture and subjectivity). Machines both produce objects and subjects of course. Industrial powers do not simply produce commodities but also subjectivities (needs, bodies, minds) (2000: 32). This is a similar line of argument to Bourdieu's concept of 'cultural reproduction' - as Negri/Hardt put it: 'In the biopolitical sphere, life is made to work for production and production is made to work for life. It is a great bee hive in which the queen bee continuously oversees production and reproduction.' (2000: 32) - in complex, interlinking, interactive relationships. Negri introduces biopolitics thus: 'Politics today is not exercised on a plane of abstract power (administratively separated), but on a plane that has invested the whole of life. [...] Politics and life have become engrained into one another.' [debate on counter-empire at sherwood, 23-24 february 2002, http://www.sherwood.it/controimpero/ May 17, 2002] 'The legitimation of the imperial machine is born at least in part of the communications industries, that is, of the transformation of the new mode of production into a machine. [...] The machine is self-validating, auto-poietic - that is, systemic. It constructs social fabrics that evacuate or render ineffective any contradiction; it creates situations in which, before coercively neutralising difference, seem to absorb it in an insignificant play of self-generating and self-regulating equilibria. ' (2000: 33-4) generating subjectivity: Similarly, subjectivity is constantly generated through social processes. In the 'factories of subjectivity' (echoing Foucault), all subjectivity can be recognised as socially constructed and artificial. Hardt and Negri argue that as the place of production becomes more and more place-less, subjectivities become correspondingly indeterminate, still generated but generated in new forms: 'The imperial social institutions might be seen, then, in a fluid process of the generation and corruption of subjectivity.' (2000: 197) 'The Empire's institutional structure is like a software program that carries a virus along with it, so that it is continually modulating and corrupting the institutional forms around it.' (2000: 197-8) Hardt and Negri's use of the term 'corruption' is interesting; taken from Aristotle, it refers to a perpetual becoming of bodies that is complementary to generation (from De generatione et corruptione, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Thus, corruption might be called 'de-generation - a reverse process of generation and composition, a moment of metamorphosis that potentially frees spaces for change' (2000: 201) This lends itself well to my reading of Ordure::real-time and its dialectical operations, even if, this in itself, is a corruption of Hardt and Negri's project. Corruption (a good term as it lends itself to viruses and is a form of violence) is the negation of generation (for more on this, see Reiner SchŸrmann, Des hŽgŽmonies brisŽes, Mouvezin: T.E.R., 1996, cited in Hardt and Negri, 2000: 389). For instance, the violence of corruption is self-evident in the capitalist relations of production as exploitation. Hardt and Negri say capitalism is by definition a system of corruption, and the task is to investigate 'how corruption can be forced to cede its control to generation' (2000: 392). It all sounds uncannily dialectical to me in describing Empire as: 'characterised by a fluidity of form - an ebb and flow of formation and deformation, generation and degeneration' (2000: 202) Th catalyst for generation in Hardt and Negri is desire (following in the tradition of Deleuze and Guattari). They see this as indicative of collective human action - what might be called agency in old terminology: 'This production is purely and simply human reproduction, the power of generation. Desiring production is generation, or rather the excess of labor and the accumulation of a power incorporated into the collective movement of singular essences, both its cause and its completion.' (2000: 388) In their terms, generation is a 'collective mechanism or apparatus of desire' (2000: 388); what I am attempting to argue is something similar to this but more frigid (without desire) but no less dynamic. Where we differ is of whether generation itself is dialectic. Yet, we remain in broad agreement that politics needs to articulate itself in terms of generative processes in lieu of the regenerative mechanisms built into capitalism itself; in the sense that production is generative. They say: 'Generation is there, before all else, as basis and motor of production and reproduction. The generative connection gives meaning to communication, and any model of (everyday, philosophical, or political) communication that does not respond to this primacy is false.' (2000: 389) Multitude: In a perverse twist, the multitude has set the tone for globalisation (aka Empire). The relative success of international movements and resistance to imperialism has in a way set the scene for globalisation. It can be seen to have called for relations that turn on power in a way that has unleashed even greater levels of exploitation. In the new world order, smaller minorities control even greater levels of wealth; racial oppression has become more pronounced despite the apparent end of colonialisation and imperialism. That is not to say earlier kinds of exploitation were preferable. Hardt and Negri think the present situation opens new opportunities for resistance (such as those expressed by the anti-capitalist movement): 'We claim that Empire is better in the same way that Marx insists that capitalism is better than forms of society and modes of production that came before it.' (2000:43). Their argument, like Marx's is that a rejection of previous regimes of exploitation is clearly for the better, and correspondingly that the potential for liberation is increased with any new situation. They are also keen not to fall into a false dichotomy between local and global forces and especially the valorisation of the local or even the nation state as some perverse rejection of global capitalism. There is often a false logic at work that the local preserves difference and the global tends towards homogenisation. The struggle against global capitalism must be as global as the thing it wishes to dispose (hence the sentiments of groups like 'globalise resistance' that draws upon a history of leftist internationalism). The phrase 'Workers of the world unite' effectively carries this sense of internationalist solidarity. However, Hardt and Negri have problems with this sense of the proletariat - more on this later - and suggest the tragic irony that 'what they fought for came about despite their defeat' (2000: 50). Globalisation is a consequence of the power of the multitude, in their terms. The distinction is made between the multitude (from Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, 1949) and the people - where the people are tied to the concept of the sovereign nation, of a single will, while the multitude is multiplicity, an open set of relations. (The crowd might figure here too - see Canetti.) They remain in conflict such that 'every nation must make the multitude into a people.' (2000: 103) Thus, for Hardt and Negri, the nation stands as a dominant force of stasis for the most part (in europe, producing otherness and alterity - note: both are produced not natural, and are dialectical in the relation of self and other) and only takes on a revolutionary function in terms of subaltern nation (and then only temporarily). This explains the poor record of socialist regimes as they are tied to the totalitarian logic of the nation: for example Stalin's pamphlett on Marxism and the national question of 1935 collapses the revolutionary spirit of communism for nationalism. Hardt and Negri see this as tragic irony in that nationalist socialism comes to resemble national socialism because the same machine of national sovereignty lies behind the logic of both. They remain communists: we are not anarchists but communists who have seen how much repression and destruction of humanity have been wrought by liberal and socialist big governments. We have seen how this is being re-created in imperial government, just when the circuits of productive cooperation have mad labour as a whole capable of constituting itself as a government.' (2000: 350) Definition of the proletariat in their terms (multitude): They define the proletariat thus: 'We understand the concept "proletariat," however, to refer not just to the industrial working class but to all those who subordinated to, exploited by, and produce under the rule of capital. From this perspective, then, as capital ever more globalises its relations of production, all forms of labour tend to be proletarianised.'(2000: 256) They claim the proletariat has transformed and correspondingly so does an understanding of it - both redefined as the subject of labour and revolt, under new conditions of production (that has always separated the producer from the means of production and thus creates proletarians and capitalists). They employ the term 'proletariat' as a broad category to includes 'all those whose labour is directly or indirectly exploited by and subjected to capitalist norms of production and reproduction' (2000: 52) Although they are clearly broadening the category beyond the industrial working class, they also recognise differences and stratifications. This is certainly not a rejection of the revolutionary potential out of hand (yet there are serious problems with their analysis - see Callinois). 'The proletariat is not what it used to be, but that does not mean it has vanished' (2000: 53). Immaterial labour figures here in their redefinition of the proletariat as a class - as both within and sustaining capital. Correspondingly, they see new forms of proletarian resistance, solidarity and militancy - quite some optimism in fact. The key lies in the power of the multitude (this strange religious sounding term) who have constructed Empire and thus hold the key to its destruction: 'Since the spatial and temporal dimensions of political action are no longer the limits but the constructive mechanisms of imperial government, the coexistence of the positive and the negative on the terrain of immanence is now configured as an open alternative. Today the same movements and tendencies constitute both the rise and the decline of Empire.' (2000: 374) Thus, Empire presents a greater potential for revolution than previously - transforming class conflict: 'The new proletariat is not a new industrial working class' (2000: 402). The previous agents of change, they argue, only operate as the privileged site in the context of a Marxist concept of value that could be measured - this is no longer possible if it ever was. Derrida puts this well: 'We lack the measure of the measure' (1994: 78). The claim is that distinctions between productive, reproductive and unproductive labour have become blurred, and as a result, both material and immaterial labour, both intellectual and corporeal, are exploited by capital. Control over communication has increasingly become a key site of struggle, building upon the work of JŸrgen Habermas (in his Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984) The multitude both hold to key to its development and form, and its alternative with little direct control over these processes. The multitude has become the political and revolutionary subject: 'whose struggles have produced Empire as an inversion of its own image and who now represents on this new scene an uncontrollable force.' (2000: 394) Biopolitics again: The biopolitical dimension is recognised in the changed nature of productive labour, and what contemporary (mainly Italian) Marxists have called 'immaterial labour' (see my 'The Author as Producer' upgrade for more on this). The productive labour of the industrial factory is increasingly becoming replaced by intellectual, immaterial and communicative labour (making everything like a factory). Simultaneously, the changed social relations of this changing pattern of labour also indicate new subjectivities - both in terms of exploitation and resistance to exploitation. Thus production has (again) become the site of focus (to understand how relations of production unfold for instance). Negri says: 'This process of dissolution of the political categories of modernity coincides with the third industrial revolution: IT and the constitution of production as decentred throughout society. This also has a double effect: -An expansion of biopolitical power, capitalist command of the general intellect -A reappropriation of the instruments of labour. Life style is reinvented as productivity. Labour, living labour, activity remains at the centre of our lives, so do exploitative relations. By exploitation I mean your capacity to steal my labour versus my capacity to take it back and use it for my own desires [...] The concept of sovereignty changed. Sovereignty was always a relationship, even in modernity. It couldn't be defined in terms of the sacred or unidirectionality. Exercising sovereignty means to have a relation with the subject (subjected). This relationship becomes more complex when this subject produces and is posed in a creative dynamics. Sovereignty, in its dialectical mode, always posed an obstacle for the subject to overcome.' [debate on counter-empire at sherwood, 23-24 february 2002, http://www.sherwood.it/controimpero/ May 17, 2002] The argument is that national sovereignty is linked to national mythologies. The form of political subjectivity is not at all clear any more (not as simple as imagined by Marx perhaps nor as bleak as his opponents). Hardt and Negri look to Spinoza for a possible answer (Negri's essay 'The Savage Anomaly' of 1980 develops his position on Spinoza, as in the theory of autonomy, in the privileging of potential against power). See below. -- Modernity: is defined by conflicts. Hardt and Negri see it as 'Modernity itself is defined by crisis, a crisis that is born of the uninterrupted conflict between the immanent, constructive, creative forces and the transcendent power aimed at restoring order.' (2000: 76) Herein lies the synthesis of the development of productive forces and relations of domination that are embedded in a history of modernity (slavery is a pertinant old, and current, example). It might seem that they are disregarding critiques within modernity itself - but they recognise the power of critiques like that of the Frankfurt School yet reject its dialectical method as within the very logic of the modern project that they seek to undo. In describing those that attempted to map the crisis of modernity and seek redemption, such as Walter Benjamin: 'Certainly the dialectic, that cursed dialectic that had held together and anointed European values, had been emptied out from within and was now defined in completely negative terms' (2000: 377). They are particularly thinking of his 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History'. They argue for a new materialism outside of the dialectic, rejecting models such as the transcendence of history. Here Benjamin lies in contrast to the non-dialectical thinking of Deleuze, Derrida et al. The rejection of binaries is the foundation of much postmodernist and postcolonialist theory. Their example is the work of Homi Bhabha whose work aims to reject binaries such as those the colonial project was based on. Thus, it is nondialectical in method, despite being haunted by Hegelian dialectical logic according to Hardt and Negri. Bhabha proposes hybidity as a radical alternative as if all forms of power are locked into hierarchies based on binaries. In other words, the alternative it proposes presupposes a particular power set of power structures. Empire is based on the notion that this is a different form of power that needs conceptualising anew. Evidence is found in numerous sites but a relevant example to the above would be 'fundamentalisms' (of all kinds, Islamic and Christian included) that despite the appearance of being a return to tradition are in fact, new inventions in response to perceived threats. Fundamentalism is a refusal of Western modernity making it 'anti-Western' and 'anti-Modern' (the revolution in Iran is a neat example of the rejection of the global market). This is not pre-modern but thoroughly post-modern. The global market similarly rejects the model of the nation-state, making national economics increasingly irrelevant. In this (postmodern) way, 'The world market establishes a real politics of difference' (2000: 151), and postmodernism presents us with the logic for these operations of global capitalism (echoing the sentiments of Arif Dirlik in calling these postmodern thinkers the 'intelligentsia of global capitalism' (from The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Boulder: Westview Press 1997: 77, quoted in Hardt and Negri, 2000: 138 - this is a repeat quote but great all the same). Difference is enacted through capital's mobility, flexibility, and hybridity - not rejecting hierarchies but establishing new hierarchies (much against what it appears to stand for of course). The so-called intelligentsia (particularly of the US) unwittingly support this logic in their championing of postmodern and postcolonial sensibility, even in terms of critique of capitalism itself. Mobility and flexibility, rather than representing some sense of freedom from hierarchies (or even old binaries), in fact are forced upon much of the world populations in enforced migration as a result of the search for work or as a result of war. Migration takes on special significance for Hardt and Negri (along the lines of 'nomadism': 'A spectre haunts the world and it is the spectre of migration. All the powers of the old world are allied in a merciless operation against it, but the movement is irresistible. Along with the flight from the so-called Third World there are flows of political refugees and transfers of intellectual labour power, in addition to the massive movements of the agricultural, manufacturing, and service proletariat.' (2000: 213) This simultaneously presents escape from misery and hope for betterment that often ends in more misery. More positively, migration represents levels of struggle and resistance to imposed and symbolic borders. On another level, migration also takes place between humans, animals and machines, between genders and sexualities in recognition that nature is artificial and open to mutations and hybrid forms (echoing Donna Haraway's 'cyborg fable' and a whole host of other imitators). What is required is a body that does not submit to command: 'If you find your body refusing these "normal" modes of life, don't despair - realise your gift!' (2000: 216; with respect to Guattari's resistance to normalising bodies). There is nothing 'normal' about nature. 'The force that must instead drive forward theoretical practice to actualise these terrains of potential metamorphosis is still (and ever more intensely) the common experience of the new productive practices and the concentration of productive labour on the plastic and fluid terrain of the new communicative, biological and mechanical technologies.' (2000: 218) measure: (add to chaos and fractal measurement perhaps) Under the conditions of modernity, 'If there is no measure, the metaphysicians say, there is no cosmos; and if there is no cosmos, there is no state. In the framework one cannot think of the immeasurable, or rather, one must not think it.' (2000: 355) In other words, measurement signalled order. To Hardt and Negri, beyond the measurable lies virtuality (and postmodernity): 'The passage from the virtual through the possible to the real is the fundamental act of creation' and it is living labour that 'constructs the passageway from the virtual to the real; it is the vehicle of possibility'. (2000: 357; in part, this refers to Henri Bergson's ideas in, 'The Possible and the Real' in The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle Andison, New York: Philosophical Library, 1946, pp.91-106) The relationship between possibility and virtuality sounds rather contradictory, yet: 'contradiction is never static, however, in material logic (that is political, historical and ontological logic), which poses it on the terrain of the possible and thus on the terrain of power' (2000: 360) Labour (immaterial and material), that which appears outside measure (old ideas of value, etc), 'appears simply as the power to act, that which is at once singular and universal: singular insofar as labour has become the exclusive domain of the brain and the body of the multitude; and universal insofar as the desire that the multitude expresses in the movement from the virtual to the possible is constantly constituted as a common thing (2000: 358; this 'common thing' relates to the idea of community in their view). informational production: The generally accepted view is that we have moved from the modern or industrial period (in which industry and manufacturing of durable goods) into a new current paradigm of informational production (in which services are provided and manipulating information is the predominant mode of production). Amongst others, this is the argument of those like Daniel Bell, Coming of Post-Industrial Society, New York: Basic Books 1973 - who also allegedly coined the contentious term 'post-industrial'. Correspondingly, there has been a general migration of labour form the industrial factory to the service sectors (particularly in the US and UK, and much like the earlier migration from agriculture to industry). By service sector, this covers education, transport, health care, entertainment and advertising to name but a few, those areas that demand mobile and flexible workers, and that are characterised by knowledge, information, and communication - making the informational economy. Importantly, the claim is not that industrial processes have ceased or that they have simply shifted to another part of the world, but that even industrial processes have been changed by the informational revolution. To a large extent, in the 'over-developed world', the assembly lines have been replaced by the network as the organisational model and metaphor for production of all kinds. This is what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the 'rhizome' - the myth of a democratic, nonhierechical, noncentred network structure (2000: 299; in, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans, Brian Massumi,, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, pp.3-25). Relations now are established from all points and nodes which simultaneously act in favour of organised struggle and against it (like the formation of the internet itself designed to resist attack). The distinction between traditional manufacturing and the provision of services has become less distinct, wherein communication and information play an increasingly central role in production processes. A classic example is that of the automobile industry - charcaterised as the shift from 'Fordist' to 'Toyotist' models. (Corresponding to the introduction of the assembly line and mass manufacturing, Taylorism allowed for modifications in the production process and Fordism in its regulation of social reproduction.) Toyotism differs from Fordism in that it maintains its efficiency of production but allows the market to feed back into this process - in other words, it completes the feedback loop that was previously too slow and inefficient. Thus, production decisions are made immediately in reaction to the market, following the network paradigm of integrated production and distribution. Significantly, the network brings a model of production and distribution simultaneously (and is thus fundamentally different to the alleged role of railways as part of the industrial revolution). In its extreme, commodities are only produced after the consumer has ordered it. (2000: 290) Immaterial labour: Wealth is increasingly immaterial in the form of social relations, communications networks, informations systems, so too the nature of labour. The labour involved in this new type of production of 'immaterial goods' is cast as 'immaterial labour' (after Maurizio Lazzarato's definition in 'Immaterial Labour', in, Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in Italy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). This can partly be recognised in relation to the computer, in the way it has redefined labour as well as social practices and relations. Hardt and Negri argue that we increasingly think like computers, ordering our thoughts, practices and productive activities like networked communications technologies and their model of interaction. The reverse applies too in that: 'one novel aspect of the computer is that it can continually modify its own operation through its use' (2000: 291). Labouring practices follow this pattern in which the separation of the labouring body, mind and machine and increasingly blurred. It is argued that with the increased computerisation of labouring practices, the worker is increasingly removed from the object of his/her labour (2000: 292) - tending towards a condition of abstract labour (alienated or not). But this takes as its examples processes of production where a physical, mechanical machine has been replaced by a virtual one, rather rather than software production so appears a rather wild general point. The production of hardware also raises an interesting point of direct engagement with the physical material but nothing of the functionality of computing (see quotes elsewhere). Once the hallmark of the industrial process, collaborative and collective effort is now increasingly organised through communications networks and not by capital itself. The role of Unions suffers accordingly but also perhaps and arguably their need - as 'In the expression of its own creative energies, immaterial labour thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism' (2000: 294). What optimism - note the word 'potential' and it doesn't seem so wild - within a few pages, new communications technologies have in fact created new lines of exclusion and inequality, with suitable global reach and spontaneity (2000: 300). To stress the negative aspects: the networking of groups of labour power has led to unprecedented competition among workers and hence lower wages, as well as information technologies have served to indirectly break the structural resistance of labour power in terms of wage demands - traditionally organised through unions. (See No Logo for more detail on this) General intellect: Marx's term 'general intellect' goes some way to describe the influence of science, communications and language on labour practices. Thus, labour is made more collective by the sharing of techniques and knowledge. Hardt and Negri extends this to include intellectual and corporeal (brain and body) labour in their redefinition of labour practices. (2000: 364) As a result, production has become 'a machine that is full of life' (2000: 365), that expresses new collective and cooperative possibilities. Thus, 'labor becomes increasingly immaterial and realises its value through a singular and continuous process of innovation in production; it is increasingly capable of consuming or using the services of social reproduction in an ever more refined and interactive way.' (2000: 365). This is the creative process of the production of revolutionary subjectivity (akin to my figure of the artist-programmer - not really?). Machinic: Marx was no technophobe. On the relationship between workers and machines, in Capital, Marx says: 'It took time and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilises these instruments.' (1976: 554-5) Hardt and Negri's argument is that the multitude go further in merging with the machines; 'the subject is transformed into (and finds the cooperation that constitutes it multiplied in) the machine' (2000: 367). Here they are clearly drawing upon the concept of the 'machinic' from Deleuze and Guattari (Gilles Deleuze and FŽlix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Lane, Helen lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Humans and machine are somewhat hybridised, and their argument turns on the desire of the multitude to take exert control over these machinic transformations. 'The virtual and the possible are wedded as irreducible innovation and as a revolutionary machine'. (2000: 369). I would say they are dialectically engaged. The multitude are machinic, using machines and technology productively. According to Hardt and Negri, the political demands are as follows: 1. global citizenship; 2. A social wage and guaranteed income for all; 3. The right to reappropriation (2000: 400-6). The last category is of interest as this emphasises that machines are not simply to be used to produce more efficiently, but the multitude become machinic in that the means of production is integrated in their minds and bodies (2000: 406). They offer the figure of the 'social worker' to give a sense of the rising militancy: 'This is the order of the social worker and immaterial labor, an organisation of productive and political power as a biopolitical unity managed by the multitude, organised by the multitude, directed by the multitude - absolute democracy in action.' (2000: 410) Although not clear about the precise forms, they see this growing militancy as a constituent form not representational (thus, not simply representatives of the working class in the sense that Benjamin might have meant in 'The Author as Producer'). 'This militancy makes resistance into counterpower and makes rebellion into a project of love.' And finally the last lines are: 'This is a revolution that no power will control - because biopower and communism, cooperation and revolution remain together, in love, simplicity, and also innocence. This is the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist.' (2000: 413) -- inside/outside: Their claim is that the border between 'inside' and 'outside', fundamental to modernity and the place of its crisis, is no longer discernible. They say: 'In this smooth place of Empire, there is no place of power - it is both everywhere and nowhere. Empire is really an ou-topia, or really a non-place.' (2000: 190) The history of modernity and its critique operates traditionally at this juncture of inside and outside, and correspondingly between private and public space. Hardt and Negri trace the diminishing importance of these distinctions and the rise of hybidity in its (non) place. The importance in terms of analysis is that 'in effect, the place of politics has been de-actualised' (2000: 188; somewhat in the manner described by Debord in The Society of the Spectale). Here, they are echoing Fukuyama in that the end of history is the end of the crisis of modernity, and that history has ended in so much as it is described in Hegelian terms of dialectics. The opposing view would be something along the lines of the repeating cycles of economic development, that the present crisis is simply another phase (clearly not a position that Hardt and Negri would agree with). In Marx's theoretical method too, the place of exploitation and liberation are dialectically determined. Labour power is both inside and outside capital; affirming the distinction between use and exchange value. Hardt and Negri's critique of the 'value' and 'usefulness' of this determining conception of domination rests on the change in the process and non-place of production (this is drawing upon Negri's earlier work such as 'Value and Affect' boundary2, 26, no.2, 1999). It can no longer be simply defined, nor can the distinction between use and exchange value (always based on an 'illusion of separability'). But: 'That does not mean that production and exploitation have ceased. Neither have innovation and development nor the continuous restructuring of relations of power come to an end.... Empire is the non-place of world production where labour is exploited.' (2000: 210) Capital and labour are antagonistically opposed - 'this is the fundamental condition of every political theory of communism' (2000: 237). (note: Hardt and Negri call themselves communists, 2000: 350) And: 'The identification of the enemy, however, is no small task given that exploitation tends no longer to have a specific place and that we are immersed in a system of power so deep and complex that we can no longer determine specific difference or measure.' (2000: 211) Outside/inside: The imperialist character of capitalism is well founded in Marxist thought (but perhaps particularly through the work of Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg - without going into their differences). Capitalism requires this sense of the outside as it constantly seeks to widen its markets and circulation: 'Capitalism is an organism that cannot sustain itself without constantly looking beyond its boundaries, feeding off its external environment. Its outside is essential.' (2000: 224) Rosa Luxembourg sees this more in terms of pillage and theft. Following this logic, the only way to put an end to imperialism is to put an end to capitalism (or this will simply happen when natural resources run out - it is not an unlimited resource or without its own sense of exploitation). 'Formal subsumption' (Marx, Capital, pp.1019-38) describes the way in which capital incorporates labour practices outside its domain into its own set of relations of production. This sense of discipline, in turn, produces its antithesis and the desire to be free of these constraints. This is particularly common in the global market where Third World labourers exist in the first world (and vice versa). 'Third Worldism' describes this antagonism between the labour of the third world and the capital of the first world. (note: Actually the term 'Third World' arising from imperialism, offers little credibility at this point in time - once criticised for being too generalist, now ineffectual as it was coined to describe those countries outside the primary conflict of the bipolar cold war between dominant capitalist and socialist nations, 2000: 333). -- Alex Callinicos, on Empire, marxism 2002, 10 july By March 2002 (2 years after publication), Empire had sold 52,000 copies (massive number for an academic book), and has been translated into 10 languages. It has also replaced No Logo as the bible of the anti-capitalist movement despite its academic tone. Interestingly, it reveals many of the same tensions and problems related to this movement. It is unashamedly materialist yet non-dialectical (as it argues that modern power, itself dialectical, is over, and has been replaced by Empire's 'network power'). Firstly, the context for the book is important: developing out of Negri considerable political history and relationship to the 'autonomists' and 'disobedienti' (the disobedient ones) in Italy. He some from a tradition of granting primacy to revolutionary subjectivity (and de-emphasising objective relations as a study like Marx's Capital sets out to do). He also borrows something of his method from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (and Guattari, via Spinoza, Nietzsche and Foucault), partly to reconcile the defeat of the Italian working class (workerism) at the end of the 1970s (the fiat workers strike and defeat was a parallel to what was happening in the UK with the miners strike). Deleuze argues that resistance is implicit in life itself, mostly through force of the complex nature of desire. This is an optimistic idea. Callinicos reminds the audience of Gramsci popular quote: 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will'. Note: 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will' attributed to Gramsci but actually a varaiation of Romain Rolland's phrase 'pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will' in Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971: 174 (footnote). Some well-placed pessimism is part of an analysis of the conditions to move beyond resistance to the transformation of society. In summary: Empire defines how capitalism is developing as transnational, fluid, centre-less (in parallel to the decentred subject of post-structuralism). Hardt and Negri say 'there is no place of power, it is everywhere and nowhere'. This clearly rejects the classical marxist position of imperialism. Hardt and Negri argue this has been transcended by a single power of Empire (and this is not to be confused with the simplistic notion of the imperialism of the US). This is not just a new phase of capitalism but a new form of sovereignty that is no longer based on the model of the nation-state (this transformation from the sovereignty of the nation-state to the contemporary new world order is well rehearsed elsewhere too - for instance, Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, New York: Colombia University Press, 1996). Thus, it is subject to no limits, no boundaries. It is the multitude that has produced these changes. The controversial figure of the multitude (not crowd) are the subjects of transformation. Two key concepts emerge: Empire and Multitude. Empire (aka globalisation) sounds rather like liberal descriptions of cosmopolitan democracy (kevin robins's contribution to the kahve event even - pt this reference in perhaps). It clearly makes reference to international law, human rights and so on, but it does not follow that national divisions or imperialisms are transcended. For example (despite a rejection of US imperialism as such) military strength, demonstrated in recent times not least, is based on national state - in the case of the war on afghanistan, the US rejected a wider remit of NATO involvement, in favour of single authorship - to prove their nation strength. What better example of us unilateralism than the prison camps being in cuba of all places (or even the more recent international court issue where the US has insisted on being outside the law). Hardt and Negri simply answer that the US is an agent of Empire not Empire itself. The Multitude (aka revolutionary subjects) is a self-confessed poetic image intended to demonstrate how class conflict is realised under contemporary conditions (it is a metaphor, but does it operate beyond metaphor?). In a sense it tries to have its cake and eat it - by combining Marxism and post-structuralist ideas of fragmentation. This, they claim, is a new way of thinking class conflict that includes everyone who is oppressed by capital. Surely Marx's view of exploitation is more precise and useful, productive - as it identifies the working class as those whose work generates profit for others. It is precisely because of this that they have the power to resist, to overthrow capital. (This is not romanticism in believing the working class will spontaneously rise up but dialectical logic in reversing the way power unfolds - according to this logic, this is the only way change can happen). This more precise and more useful for political practice. The working class have the power to break the system (a lesson unfortunately ignored by the anti-capitalist movement unless it combines forces with the traditional agents of change). Anti-capitalists have to embrace this principle not merely the multitude (as they already do). Too much reliance on the multitude can lead people up a blind alley, relies on spontaneity, fluidity and network metaphor not organised solidarity. It seems to develop the swarm metaphor (from No Logo), add academic gloss - these are direct references that the Anti-capitalist movement turns on, is turned on by. It seems necessary to oppose the trajectory of Empire with classical Marxism. Even in Empire these tensions remain unresolved. Ambiguities remain between the nation-state and Empire; between the proletariat and the multitude. This crucial link between the anti-capitalist movement and the proletariat is fundamental to the work of Bourdieu on neo-liberalism. Although Negri argues against the dialectic, the old and the new need to brought into tension (with a return to Hegel). The Benjamin quote that 'a history of civilisation is simultaneously a history of barbarism' makes a similar point. All these qualifications enable the shift from resistance to social transformation (eg. hackers are locked into resistance mode only). -- Hegel: Allegory of the divine order. Transformation into the 'dialectical dramaturgy and in every scene the end is everything' (Hardt & Negri, 2000: 82). Their problem with Hegelian resolution is its teleology and implied attack of Spinoza's sense of immanence - to their minds a revolutionary theory.