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July 4, 2004
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."
A global world did come about. It was one created by global capital that trashed the conditions and employment of the old manufacturing working class during the 1970s and 1980s.
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."
Nothing about the welfare state, citizenship or deliberative democracy.The nation state in modernity represents a state that imposed rigid territorializing regimes on labour; fixed territorializing structures, and figures of impriosnment. Nothing about the working class becoming a part of the social contract and creatively dealing with the pressure on working class conditions through a social wage.
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.
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I suspect that the reason that Hardt and Negri want to ignore democracy is the old problem of "what if you give the people the vote and they don't vote for what they ought to?" Typically, you have to fall back on something like "bad faith", "lowered consciousness", etc. Within the context of the nation state, the multitude has demonstrated a deplorable willingness to exploit the multitudes of other nation states.
Admittedly, there is frequently some truth to such analyses, but they can all to easily flow into a condescending attitude of "we know best" when in fact everybody is in a similar state of delusion. If everyone's understanding is conditioned by their psycho-social-historical consciousness, there is no particular reason to exempt the critical theorist from this predicament.
And by the way, is it my imagination, or is there not something distinctly Nietzschean in flavor to Hardt and Negri? Are they not preaching the advent of the übermultitude?
This business about "throwing open the windows of history": could it be an echo of the chapter "On the New Idol" (a diatribe against the State) in the first book of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"?
State is the name of the coleest of all cold mosnters. [...] Rather break the windows and leap to freedom.[...] Only where the state ends - look there my brothers.