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July 2, 2004
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."
It is a fair interpretation. It is actually a form of globalism, or better still a form of cosmopolitianism. This is made explicit:
"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. "
This internationalist tradition has been marginalised and barely flickers today.
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.
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I agree that their analysis is a fair interpretation of early twentieth century Marxist Internationalism. What I would dispute is that this internationalism was obviously the "will of an active mass subject". It seems to me that it was just as arguably the "will" of a relatively restricted set of movement leaders.
It seems to me that some of the "ambiguous tactical definitions" of various socialist and communist parties were sometimes adopted precisely because the individual members of the proletariat were swayed by personal and national considerations not entirely compatible with this internationalism. (The history of the labor movement in the United States being a case in point. In the U.S. organized labor arguably "closed the door" on certain segments even of the national proletariat in order to consolidate their own advantages. Labor's current attitude towards "international" proletariat is positively hostile.)
I am not saying that there was anything objectionable about Marxist internationalism - far from it - but I do take issue with what strikes to me the appropriation of the "will" of the multitude. I fear that the concept of multitude is being constructed specifically with such an appropriation in mind. This is what I referred to as "unreconstructed communism": The danger that the revolutionary theorist will be established as the high priest of the multitude, articulating the "will of an active mass subject", a will which the individual members of that mass subject are incapable of grasping on their own...