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April 23, 2004
This post gives us some insight into Negri's Empire. Shavro over at The Pinocchio Theory says Negri's thinking is grounded in the changes that the world has gone through in the last thirty years or so: changes from industrial capitalism to a "knowledge economy," and from the Cold War to a global marketplace, in which corporations have become more powerful than nation-states. In this new economy, traditional distinctions of place and time, between physical and intellectual labor, and indeed between labor and leisure, have pretty much disappeared. Shavro goes on to say that:
"Basically, Negri argues that capitalist "production" is no longer a specific category or specific portion of society. It is no longer the "base," in comparison to which everything else would be a mere "superstructure." Rather, capitalist production is everything and everywhere -- and quite directly so. It's brain power as well as machinery, leisure time as well as work time, recreation as well as reproduction, inner thoughts as well as outer actions."
He adds that this is the situation foreseen by Adorno and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School. They presaged a state of society in which all independence would be exterminated, and everything would be subjected to the "laws" of capitalism, commodification, and instrumental reason.
Hardt and Negri conclude the Preface of Empire by saying that they "hope to have contributed in this book is a general theoretical framework and a toolbox of concepts for theorizing and acting in and against Empire."
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