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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Empire & progress « Previous | |Next »
June 16, 2004

Haedt & Negri says that:


"Despite recognizing 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-state to protect against global capital. We claim that Empire is better in the same way that Marx insists that capitalism is better than the forms of society and modes of production that came before it."

They then say that Empire does away with the cruel regimes of modern power and also increases the potential for liberation.

They go on to say that this position is swimming against the current of left nationalism. This places Hardt & Negri at odds with the position of philosophy.com on globalization which defends place.

Hardt & Negri go on to say that:


"In the long decades of the current crisis of the communist, socialist, and liberal Left that has followed the 1960s, a large portion of critical thought, both in the dominant countries of capitalist development and in the subordinated ones, 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 the localization of struggles. Such arguments are sometimes constructed in terms of "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... At other times such political arguments draw on the long tradition of Leftist nationalism in which (in the best cases) the nation is conceived as the primary mechanism of def ense against the domination of foreign and/or global capital...Today the operative syllogism at the heart of the various forms of "local" Leftist strategy seems to be entirely reactive: If capitalist domination is becoming ever more global, then our resistances to it must defend the local and construct barriers to capital's accelerating flows. From this perspective, the real globalization of capital and the constitution of Empire must be considered signs of dispossession and defeat."

Hardt & Negri's observation that a large portion of critical thought... in the dominant countries of capitalist development... has sought to recompose sites of resistance that are founded on the identities of social subjects or national and regional groups is true. And these resistances are often grounded on political analysis on the localization of struggles that are constructed in in terms of "place-based" movements.

See here for an Australian example. And a lot of this resistance is reactive, as it mourns the passing of the old forms of life and the destruction of cultural and heritage.

This kind of resistance does acknowledge that capitalist domination is becoming ever more global and it holds that our resistances to it must defend the local and construct barriers to capital's accelerating flows.

But for good reason. Why should we allow the cultural heritage of a place to be destroyed by development? Places are where we live. So we want these places to express our embodied mode of life.

Hence we will resist our places becoming just a space or location for capital flows as much as we can. To that extent we, as embodied beings, stand against the progress of global capital. The flows of international captial are indifferent to the character of place based on lived bodily existence. Only location or space exists.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:34 PM | | Comments (0)
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