This is an interesting review of Germaine Greer's Whitefella Jump Up, where she advocates a return to Aboriginality for white as well as black Australians. She envisages an Aboriginal republic run on hunter-gatherer principles, distancing itself from the consumerism - and the wars - of the British and the Americans.
Greer says that whitefella spiritual desolation has its roots in settler guilt. This has created a culture of denial in which whitefellas drink to dull the pain. Furthermore, white Australians are destroying the environment because they know, deep down, that the land is not theirs. Greer says that "If we truly felt that this country was our home...we could not despoil it in this manner."
This is right. Many white Australians do share Greer's unease about their destructive relationship to the land. But, as the reviewer in the New Statesman points out, Australians are hardly the only people in the world seemingly hell-bent on exploiting their country, cutting down its trees, overfishing its oceans, pumping toxins into its air and taking too much water from their rivers.
Nor is whitefella spiritual desolation an Ausralian prerogative, either. The west is full of people suffering from the loss of the spiritual beliefs which sustained their grandparents, and who are attempting to patch over that loss by "borrowing" from whatever ancient tradition happens to be in vogue.
What does a return to Aboriginality as a way to whitefella spiritual desolation mean? Greer, it appears is urging white Australians to embrace a hunter-gatherer culture and eat kangaroo instead of beef. She is not suggesting that they abandon their houses, head into the desert and start digging up witchetty grubs.
Embracing a hunter-gatherer society is an odd approach to the need to develop a dwelling ethics. One that is popular though, in the sense of white people learning from the indigenous people about how to care for their country.
Hardt & Negri end chapter one by making the turn to the materialist teleology of Spinoza, who proclaimed at the dawn of modernity that the prophet produces its own people. They say that along with Spinoza:
" ...we should recognize prophetic desire as irresistible, and all the more powerful the more it becomes identified with the multitude. It is not at all clear that this prophetic function can effectively address our political needs and sustain a potential manifesto of the postmodern revolution against Empire, but certain analogies and paradoxical coincidences do seem striking. For example, whereas Machiavelli proposes that the project of constructing a new society from below requires "arms" and "money" and insists that we must look for them outside, Spinoza responds: Don't we already posses them? Don't the necessary weapons reside precisely within the creative and prophetic power of the multitude? Perhaps we, too, locating ourselves within the revolutionary desire of postmodernity, can in turn respond: Don't we already possess "arms" and "money"? The kind of money that Machiavelli insists is necessary may in fact reside in the productivity of the multitude, the immediate actor of biopolitical production and reproduction. The kind of arms in question may be contained in the potential of the multitude to sabotage and destroy with its own productive force the parasitical order of postmodern command."
And, on this romantic note, so ends chapter one.
Hardt & Negri close out chapter one by asking a question:
"How can we construct an apparatus for bringing together the subject (the multitude) and the object (cosmopolitical liberation) within postmodernity? Clearly one cannot achieve this... even simply by following the indications offered by the Marx-Engels manifesto."
"In the cold placidness of postmodernity, what Marx and Engels saw as the co-presence of the productive subject and the process of liberation is utterly inconceivable. And yet, from our postmodern perspective the terms of the Machiavellian manifesto seem to acquire a new contemporaneity. Straining the analogy with Machiavelli a little, we could pose the problem in this way: How can productive labor dispersed in various networks find a center? How can the material and immaterial production of the brains and bodies of the many construct a common sense and direction, or rather, how can the endeavor to bridge the distance between the formation of the multitude as subject and the constitution of a democratic political apparatus find its prince?"
They then add that the form in which the political should be expressed as subjectivity today is not at all clear.
As chapter one comes to an end Hardt & Negri make a brief turn to Althusser, Machiavelli and the political manifesto. They say:
"...the manifestos of Machiavelli and Marx-Engels define the political as the movement of the multitude and they define the goal as the self-production of the subject. Here we have a materialist teleology."
Hardt & Negri argument is that empire as a form of globalization is a process powered from below. Empire is the sovereign power that governs the present-day world and it is the political form of capitalist globalisation. the so-called ‘right of intervention’ as stemming from ‘a permanent state of emergency and exception justified by the appeal to essential values of justice.
The transformation of the paradigm of rule is also looked at interms of ‘the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another’ (p.xiii). In this context, they utilise both Foucault’s concept of the society of control, and Foucault’s insights into the nature of biopower (i.e. a ‘form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it’ (p.23-24)). In this framework, H&N see the contemporary form of Empire as consubstantial to the existence of a dipole (which they call the ‘imperial two-headed eagle’): on the one hand ‘a juridical structure and a constituted power, constructed by the machine of biopolitical command’ (p.60), and on the other hand ‘the plural multitude of productive, creative subjectivities of globalization that have learned to sail on this enormous sea’ (p.60). This dipole today cannot exist without any one of the two terms; in other words: ‘the deterritorializing power of the multitude is the productive force that sustains Empire’ (p.61).
That is the loose and general framework of Empire.
Hardt and Negri say that once you adopt their perspective of the double headed eagle, then:
"....we can return to the juridical framework we investigated earlier and recognize the reasons for the real deficit that plagues the transition from international public law to the new public law of Empire, that is, the new conception of right that defines Empire. In other words, the frustration and the continual instability suffered by imperial right as it attempts to destroy the old values that served as reference points for international public law (the nation-states, the international order of Westphalia, the United Nations, and so forth) along with the so-called turbulence that accompanies this process are all symptoms of a properly ontological lack. As it constructs its supranational figure, power seems to be deprived of any real ground beneath it, or rather, it is lacking the motor that propels its movement. The rule of the biopolitical imperial context should thus be seen in the first instance as an empty machine, a spectacular machine, a parasitical machine. "
What is going on here? Benevolent hegemony by the US as stated dby the Washington neo-conservatives? Or is there something more? Remember that Empire a decentred and deterritorialising apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers for Hardt & Negri. Theres is a radicalised version of current understandings of "globalisation."
Consequently, they refuse "traditional" Marxist understandings of U.S. imperialism and operates with a "postmodernised global economy," Hardt and Negri reject the neocon position that the U.S. can act as a centre for an imperialist project.
Hardt & Negri say that the way the decentred and deterritorialising apparatus of rule operates has a lot to do with the multitude:
"A new sense of being is imposed on the constitution of Empire by the creative movement of the multitude, or really it is continually present in this process as an alternative paradigm. It is internal to Empire and pushes forward its constitution, not as a negative that constructs a positive or any such dialectical resolution. Rather it acts as an absolutely positive force that pushes the dominating power toward an abstract and empty unification, to which it appears as the distinct alternative."
Hardt and Negri play around with the metaphor of the eagle with two heads to give an adequate initial representation of the contemporary form of Empire. They say the two heads are turned outward, each attacking the other. It is an important passage becaue they use the metaphor to link empire as judicial structure to the multiitude.
"The first head of the imperial eagle is a juridical structure and a constituted power, constructed by the machine of biopolitical command. The juridical process and the imperial machine are always subject to contradictions and crises. Order and peace-the eminent values that Empire proposes-can never be achieved but are nonetheless continually reproposed. The juridical process of the constitution of Empire lives this constant crisis that is considered (at least by the most attentive theoreticians) the price of its own development. There is, however, always a surplus. Empire's continual extension and constant pressure to adhere ever more closely to the complexity and depth of the biopolitical realm force the imperial machine when it seems to resolve one conflict continually to open others."
"...is the plural multitude of productive, creative subjectivities of globalization that have learned to sail on this enormous sea. They are in perpetual motion and they form constellations of singularities and events that impose continual global reconfigurations on the system. This perpetual motion can be geographical, but it can refer also to modulations of form and processes of mixture and hybridization....Just as Empire in the spectacle of its force continually determines systemic recompositions, so too new figures of resistance are composed through the sequences of the events of struggle....New figures of struggle and new subjectivities are produced in the conjuncture of events, in the universal nomadism, in the general mixture and miscegenation of individuals and populations, and in the technological metamorphoses of the imperial biopolitical machine."
They say that from one perspective Empire stands clearly over the multitude and subjects it to the rule of its overarching machine, as a new Leviathan. However, from the perspective of social productivity and creativity, from what we have been calling the ontological perspective, the hierarchy is reversed. The multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude
A well known quote from Montesquieu:
"...the accummulation of all powers legislative, executive and judicial in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced as the very definition of tyranny."
The statement of the authoritative principles of the constitutional order of the Australian republic comes from the High Court. It is the republican schoolmaster providing the ongoing education and constitutional morality that is required for an effective rule of law.
Those conservative who are pro the war in Iraq and terrorism are saying that the Muslims are attacking us--ie., Anglo-Americans-- for what we are, for our heritage and for what we think. It is not for what we do--occupying eg., Iraq.
This conservative political rhetoric informs us that the radical Islamists are offended by the Western world’s democratic freedoms, civil liberties, inter-mingling of genders, and separation of church and state. They hate us. That is why their target us with their bombs.
Now conservatives are known for their defence of the traditional principles, institutions and values of the contemporary West. And yet their defence of the revealed religion of Judaic-Christianity stands at odds with their celebration of market liberalism and commerce. Has not commerce been substituted for faith and revealed religion? Does not Costello's appeal to Christian morality appear to be an old-fashioned, pre-modern morality (the Ten Commandments) from the perspective of commerce in modernity?
One response to this line of questioning has been the exoteric and the esoteric distinction. They say one thing and mean another. The exoteric creed is the official, public doctrine, the creed which attracts the acolyte in the first place and brings him into the movement as a rank-and-file member. The esoteric creed is the unknown, hidden agenda that is known to the inner circle.
The distinction is widely used with the Washington neocons. Their official exoteric story is that the Iraq war was driven by the historical necessity of responding to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US. The neoconservative vision is based on two tenets: one is building "democracy" not only in the Middle East, but throughout the entire world; the other is establishing what they call the "benevolent global hegemony" of a rising American Imperium, an "empire of liberty."
And the neocon's esoteric story? This is where it gets a bit confusing and messy here. Some say it has to do with the old Trotsky idea of permanent revolution and the cult of power. Others say it is the Abu Ghraib Prison photos.
At this point Leo Strauss is introduced to make sense of it. However, let us put that way of talking about Leo Strauss to one side, and come at it another way that is also informed by Strauss.
Liberal modernity commands a duty to obey the rule of law, seperates church and state, subordinates religion to the state and celebrates Adam Smith's commercial way of life. What do contemporary religious conservatives who are alss economic liberals say here? Peter Costello, the federal Treasurer, says:
"Unfortunately today we see the legacy of our Judeo-Christian traditions fraying all around us. It is almost as if the capital deposit has been drawn down for such regular maintenance that the capital is running out. The maintenance demands are unending. But we are not building up the capital required to service it.
We despair of the moral decay in our community. Drug barons compete for the distribution rights to sell drugs to our children. We see moral decay in much of the rap music which glorifies violence or suicide or exploitation of other people. My partial view of hell is where people pursue their own insatiable gratification at the expense of and to the destruction of others."
Instead of placing reason and revelation into opposition Costello would say that liberal modernity needs self-restraint. Religion can help to provide to prevent relativism, moral decay and nihilism. Costello says:
"...I do want to suggest that a recovery of faith would go a long way to answering this challenge. And a government cannot, should not, get into that endeavour. If our church leaders could so engage people as to lead them to faith we should be much richer and stronger for it...And this is the point I would like to make. There are many that have not, in their hearts, acquiesced to the kind of decay which is apparent around us. They do not believe it is right. They earnestly pray for the expansion of faith and yearn for higher standards...Their inner faith keeps them going. And they join with other citizens who share the blessings that heritage brought to our country, something for which we can all give thanks. And in doing so we determine that we will not take these blessing for granted. We will not become complacent. We will each to our own ability nurture the values which were so important in bringing us to where we are today and which we need so badly to take us on."
The problem with all this is that it leaves out any consideration of the political regime and the rivalry of political opinions regarding justice and the common good. What is missing is any conssideration of political philosophy as distinct from the utilitarian economist's reduction of these opinions to naked self-seeking interests and ceaseless striving to make money. The economists make the Australian regime a clever economic growth machine rather than a political community.
Where do we look for the foundations for the Australian regime? Presumably in the Constitution of our founders? The Constitution, with its checks and balances and divisions of powers is the founding of the Australian regime. So how do conservatives interpret this document and its background texts? Does not the constitution have a central and respected place in the teaching of political things?
Did not the Constitutional founders create a nation and was not the Constitution dedicated to the principles of a low utilitarian liberalism? It certainly was not a Lockean liberalism based on natural right constitutionalism.
Is Costello saying that liberalism is not solid? That it needs the revelation of Christianity to give it's political reason solidity?
This is an article on Leo Strauss and American foreign policy of the neo-cons. According to Strauss, the purpose of foreign policy is or ought to be survival and independence, or self-preservation, and nothing else of the good city. The fundamental rightness or wrongness of political action or policy in international relations depends on the rightness or wrongness of the political regime which it supports. For the classics, justice, or what Strauss called natural right, is to be found in the best political order, or, to use his term, the best political regime.
So the foreign policy of a sensible nation is never devoted to the good of other nations, except to the extent that the good of another nation accidentally happens to promote one's own nation's existence. For the same reason, a sensible nation will not engage in imperial expansion for its own aggrandizement—though it might have to do so for its own survival.
The site hosting Hardt & Negri's Empire has been down so I will turn back to Leo Strauss. What initially attracted me to him was his critique of positivist social (political) science.
From memory Strauss argued that positivist science had divorced itself from philosophy, celebrated the fact/value distinction, presupposed the detached observer, and was divorced from "pre-scientific' understanding--common sense or the civic opinion of political life. It failed to look at political life from the perspective and experiences of the citizen or the statesman engaged in civic debate.
Positivist social science was attacked instransigently to make room for philosophy to leave its secluded academic haven, enter the marketplace and engage in political debate. Philosophy as a way of life helps others by doing what is possible to ameliorate their conditions; to defend good opinions, prudential judgements and sound practices; and to challenge misguided opinions and bad theory that undermine democracy as a good regime.
Is this a naive attempt to return to the ancient Greek polis that has little relevance to contemporay liberal democracy? Or is it an attempt to contest the strong current of "the abolition of the political" that still flows through our cultural life; an attempt to defend the political---a serious conflict and confrontation over the nature of the good life for Strauss?
Does it act as a mitigated scepticism towards the liberalism that is nurtured and practised by our political regime?
If Marx's old revolutionary mole has died, what then? How does the multitude's serpentine struggles work?
Hardt & Negri say:
"It is certainly true that the serpentine struggles we are witnessing today do not provide any clear revolutionary tactics, or maybe they are completely incomprehensible from the point of view of tactics. Faced as we are with a series of intense subversive social movements that attack the highest levels of imperial organization, however, it may be no longer useful to insist on the old distinction between strategy and tactics. In the constitution of Empire there is no longer an "outside" to power and thus no longer weak links- if by weak link we mean an external point where the articulations of global power are vulnerable...the construction of Empire, and the globalization of economic and cultural relationships, means that the virtual center of Empire can be attacked from any point. The tactical preoccupations of the old revolutionary school are thus completely irretrievable; the only strategy available to the struggles is that of a constituent counterpower that emerges from within Empire."
So how does imperial power see these serpentine struggles? Hardt and Negri say:
"Imperial power whispers the names of the struggles in order to charm them into passivity, to construct a mystified image of them, but most important to discover which processes of globalization are possible and which are not. In this contradictory and paradoxical way the imperial processes of globalization assume these events, recognizing them as both limits and opportunities to recalibrate Empire's own instruments. The processes of globalization would not exist or would come to a halt if they were not continually both frustrated and driven by these explosions of the multitude that touch immediately on the highest levels of imperial power."
However, that is where they finish the section called The Mole and the Snake to move onto the section entitled the Two-Headed Eagle
Hardt & Negri say that though recognizing a common enemy and inventing a common language of struggles are certainly important political tasks, it is not onethat they are concerned with. They say that Marx's language has seen its day:
"Marx tried to understand the continuity of the cycle of proletarian struggles that were emerging in nineteenth-century Europe in terms of a mole and its subterranean tunnels. Marx's mole would surface in times of open class conflict and then retreat underground again-not to hibernate passively but to burrow its tunnels, moving along with the times, pushing forward with history so that when the time was right (1830, 1848, 1870), it would spring to the surface again. "Well grubbed old mole." Well, we suspect that Marx's old mole has finally died."
They say that simply by focusing their own powers, concentrating their energies in a tense and compact coil, these serpentine struggles strike directly at the highest articulations of imperial order. Empire presents a superficial world, the virtual center of which can be accessed immediately from any point across the surface.
Hardt a & Negri say that we ought to be able to recognize that the varius forms of protest they mention are constituent struggles, creating new public spaces and new forms of community. They add that it is not easy.
"We must admit, in fact, that even when trying to individuate the real novelty of these situations, we are hampered by the nagging impression that these struggles are always already old, outdated, and anachronistic. The struggles at Tiananmen Square spoke a language of democracy that seemed long out of fashion; the guitars, headbands, tents, and slogans all looked like a weak echo of Berkeley in the 1960s. The Los Angeles riots, too, seemed like an aftershock of the earthquake of racial conflicts that shook the United States in the 1960s. The strikes in Paris and Seoul seemed to take us back to the era of the mass factory worker, as if they were the last gasp of a dying working class. All these struggles, which pose really new elements, appear from the beginning to be already old and outdated-precisely because they cannot communicate, because their languages cannot be translated. The struggles do not communicate despite their being hypermediatized, on television, the Internet, and every other imaginable medium. Once again we are confronted by the paradox of incommunicability."
So argues Hannah Arendt.
Hardt & Negri say that there are real obstacles that block the communication of struggles:
"One such obstacle is the absence of a recognition of a common enemy against which the struggles are directed. Beijing, Los Angeles, Nablus, Chiapas, Paris, Seoul: the situations all seem utterly particular, but in fact they all directly attack the global order of Empire and seek a real alternative. Clarifying the nature of the common enemy is thus an essential political task. A second obstacle, which is really corollary to the first, is that there is no common language of struggles that could "translate" the particular language of each into a cosmopolitan language. Struggles in other parts of the world and even our own struggles seem to be written in an incomprehensible foreign language. This too points toward an important political task: to construct a new common language that facilitates communication, as the languages of antiimperialism and proletarian internationalism did for the struggles of a previous era. Perhaps this needs to be a new type of communication that functions not on the basis of resemblances but on the basis of differences: a communication of singularities."
A quote from this review by George Scialabba of Emmanuel Todd's, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, in Dissent (Sping 2004). It reinforces the folly judgement of the previous post.
Scialabba says:
"The end of the cold war presented the United States with a fateful choice. We could relinquish the artificial financial advantages that kept money flowing into Wall Street even as foreign demand stagnated, American industry declined, and the American trade deficit grew. This would have meant military retrenchment and a period of economic austerity, but it would have restored our competitiveness, allowing for reindustrialization on a solid basis and with a more evenly distributed prosperity. However, we didn't. Instead, after declining through most of the decade, military budgets began increasing in the late nineties. Was this a deliberate decision by America's rulers to go for empire rather than rejoin an international community of equals?"
An excerpt from John B. Judis' Folly of Empire. It is pretty goood. Let me highlight some remarks:
The first is about the philosophy underpinning the foreign policy of the Clinton Whitehouse. John Judis says that these years:
"... represented a triumph of Wilsonianism. Yet, during this period, conservative Republicans challenged Wilson's legacy. The most vocal dissenters included the second and third generation of the neoconservatives who had helped shape U.S. President Ronald Reagan's domestic and foreign policy. They declared their admiration for the Theodore Roosevelt of the 1890s and the United States' first experiment with imperialism. Some, including Max Boot of the Wall Street Journal, called on the United States to unambiguously “embrace its imperial role.” Like neo-isolationist and nationalist Republicans, they scorned international institutions and rejected the idea of collective security. But unlike them, neoconservatives strongly advocated using U.S. military and economic power to transform countries and regions in the United States' image."
"Al Qaeda and its terrorist network were latter-day products of the nationalist reaction to Western imperialism. These Islamic movements shared the same animus toward the West and Israel that older nationalist and Marxist movements did. They openly described the enemy as Western imperialism. Where they differed from the older movements was in their reactionary social outlook, particularly toward women, and in their ultimate aspiration to restore the older Muslim empire to world dominance. But after September 11, as Washington tried to understand what had happened, the neoconservatives insisted that these movements were simply the products of a deranged Islam, inflamed by irrational resentment of —in the words of historian Bernard Lewis—“America's freedom and plenty.” The neoconservatives discounted the galvanizing effect that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Western power in the region had on radical Islam."
"In trying to bring the Middle East into a democratic 21st century, Bush took it—and the United States—back to the dark days at the turn of the last century. Administration officials deeply misunderstood the region and its history. They viewed the Iraqis under Saddam the same way that Americans once viewed the Filipinos under the Spanish or the Mexicans under dictator Huerta—as victims of tyranny who, once freed, would embrace their American conquerors as liberators.Bush resolved the contradiction between imperialism and liberation simply by denying that the United States was capable of acting as an imperial power. He assumed that by declaring his support for a “democratic Middle East,” he had inoculated Americans against the charge of imperialism. But, of course, the United States and Britain had always claimed the highest motives in seeking to dominate other peoples. McKinley had promised to “civilize and Christianize the Filipinos.” What mattered was not expressed motives, but methods; and the Bush administration in Iraq, like the McKinley administration in the Philippines, invaded, occupied, and sought to dominate a people they were claiming to liberate."
The strength of the Judis article is that it shows the hsitorical roots of the imperial presidency in American history:
"Americans have always believed they have a special role to play in transforming the world, and their understanding of empire and imperialism has proven critical to this process. America's founders believed their new nation would lead primarily by example, but the imperialists of the 1890s believed the United States could create an empire that would eventually dwarf the rival European empires. The difference would be that America's empire would reflect its own special values."
After looking back over the international Marxist tradition of liberation Hardt and Negri ask:
"But how can this potential for liberation be realized today? Does that same uncontainable desire for freedom that broke and buried the nation-state and that determined the transition toward Empire still live beneath the ashes of the present, the ashes of the fire that consumed the internationalist proletarian subject that was centered on the industrial working class? What has come to stand in the place of that subject? In what sense can we say that the ontological rooting of a new multitude has come to be a positive or alternative actor in the articulation of globalization?"
On the other hand, this anti-globalization multitude has a good grasp of our mutual interconnectedness and vulnerability. In the 21st century we no longer inhabit a world of discrete national communities. Instead, we live in a world where the trajectories of different countries are deeply enmeshed with each other. As David Held puts it:
"In our world, it is not only the violent exception that links people together across borders; the very nature of everyday living – of work and money and beliefs, as well as of trade, communications and finance, not to speak of the earth’s environment, connects us all in multiple ways with increasing intensity."
Now Hardt & Negri recognize that the very subject of labor and revolt has changed profoundly. They say that the composition of the proletariat has transformed and thus our understanding of it must change too. So how do they do this?
Hardt & Negri say that in modernity the old:
"....industrial working class was often accorded the leading role over other figures of labor (such as peasant labor and reproductive labor) in both economic analyses and political movements. Today that working class has all but disappeared from view. 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. .... It means, rather, that we are faced once again with the analytical task of understanding the new composition of the proletariat as a class... Our point here is that all of these diverse forms of labor 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."
"Consider the most radical and powerful struggles of the final years of the twentieth century: the Tiananmen Square events in 1989, the Intifada against Israeli state authority, the May 1992 revolt in Los Angeles, the uprising in Chiapas that began in 1994, and the series of strikes that paralyzed France in December 1995, and those that crippled South Korea in 1996. Each of these struggles was specific and based on immediate regional concerns in such a way that they could in no respect be linked together as a globally expanding chain of revolt."
"We ought to be able to recognize that this is not the appearance of a new cycle of internationalist struggles, but rather the emergence of a new quality of social movements. We ought to be able to recognize, in other words, the fundamentally new characteristics these struggles all present, despite their radical diversity. 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. The struggles are at once economic, political, and cultural-and hence they are biopolitical struggles, struggles over the form of life. They are constituent struggles, creating new public spaces and new forms of community."
What Hardt and Negri forget in their return to the cosmopolitan roots of the internationalism of the old socialists is the democratic tradition of the nation-state. The nation-state is seen as bad. What is good--the struggle to make the nation-state more democratic---is forgotten.
Hardt and Negri do say that:
"Proletarian internationalism constructed a paradoxical and powerful political machine that pushed continually beyond the boundaries and hierarchies of the nation-states and posed utopian futures only on the global terrain."
However, the paradox lies with being defeated yet winning, not democratising the nation-state. This is their argument:
"Today we should all clearly recognize that the time of such proletarian internationalism is over. That does not negate the fact, however, that the concept of internationalism really lived among the masses and deposited a kind of geological stratum of suffering and desire, a memory of victories and defeats, a residue of ideological tensions and needs. Furthermore, the proletariat does in fact find itself today not just international but (at least tendentially) global. One might be tempted to say that proletarian internationalism actually "won" in light of the fact that the powers of nation- states have declined in the recent passage toward globalization and Empire, but that would be a strange and ironic notion of victory. It is more accurate to say, following the William Morris quotation that serves as one of the epigraphs for this book, that what they fought for came about despite their defeat."
Hardt and Negri then go to give a brief historical account of the struggles of the working class. Their blindness to the process of democracy within the nation-state remains. They say:
"The struggles that preceded and prefigured globalization were expressions of the force of living labor, which sought to liberate itself from the rigid territorializing regimes imposed on it. As it contests the dead labor accumulated against it, living labor always seeks to break the fixed territorializing structures, the national organizations, and the political figures that keep it prisoner. With the force of living labor, its restless activity, and its deterritorializing desire, this process of rupture throws open all the windows of history. When one adopts the perspective of the activity of the multitude, its production of subjectivity and desire, one can recognize how globalization, insofar as it operates a real deterritorialization of the previous structures of exploitation and control, is really a condition of the liberation of the multitude."
So what we get is a closed and bounded nation state and an international working class acting as agent of rupture that throws open all the windows of history. This is close to mythmaking.
What we need to do is think in terms of the international system and the international economy in a way that includes a constitutive role for the nation-state.
In the section called 'Refrains of the "Internationale"' Hardt & Negri turn political as open up their internationalist position for consideration they do so by looking back at the tradition of Marxist Internationalism in the early twentieth century. This was a political tradition that was deeply anti-nationalist and very critical of the nation state. The nation state was the enemy and nationalism was a virus.
Hardt & Negri begin by describing this tradition.They say
"There was a time, not so long ago, when internationalism was a key component of proletarian struggles and progressive politics in general. "The proletariat has no country," or better, "the country of the proletariat is the entire world." The "Internationale" was the hymn of revolutionaries, the song of utopian futures. We should note that the utopia expressed in these slogans is in fact not really internationalist, if by internationalist we understand a kind of consensus among the various national identities that preserves their differences but negotiates some limited agreement. Rather, proletarian internationalism was antinationalist, and hence supranational and global. Workers of the world unite!-not on the basis of national identities but directly through common needs and desires, without regard to borders and boundaries."
"Internationalism was the will of an active mass subject that recognized that the nation-states were key agents of capitalist exploitation and that the multitude was continually drafted to fight their senseless wars-in short, that the nation- state was a political form whose contradictions could not be subsumed and sublimated but only destroyed. International solidarity was really a project for the destruction of the nation-state and the construction of a new global community. This proletarian program stood behind the often ambiguous tactical definitions that socialist and communist parties produced during the century of their hegemony over the proletariat....If the nation-state was a central link in the chain of domination and thus had to be destroyed, then the national proletariat had as a primary task destroying itself insofar as it was defined by the nation and thus bringing international solidarity out of the prison in which it had been trapped. "
It's cosmopolitanism hit the rocks of the national identity of the proleteriat in the twentieth century. This cosmopolitanism expressed an awareness that we lived in nation states that were side by side. However, there was also an awareness, and the acceptance, that the social democratic, welfare state provided protection from the harshness of a boom and bust capitalism that was increasingly becoming global.