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March 20, 2006
In Empire Hardt and Negri argue for a revamped Marxism in that they talk in terms of the transcendence of modern sovereignty…by the immanence of capital flows and their insistence on capitalist power as the major focus for resistance and political action. We can see this imperial corrosion of the state in the constraints placed on sovereignty in neo-liberal economic restructuring with the opening to international capital flows during the 1980s.This globalisation-induced upheaval is furthered witeh restructuring of industrial relations and the shift away from centralized bargaining to individual contracts.
But we have, contra Negri and Hardt, a reassertion of sovereignty vis-a-vis the refugee and the terrorist, rather than their thesis of the dissolution of sovereignty. This reassertion, which is associated with the demonisation of the Other, the Stranger, and their incarceration and punishment for simply being non-citizens, is part of the general apparatus of governmentality and biopower intrinsic to modern sovereignty.
Now this reassertion of sovereignty is associated with promises to provide Australians with a sense of security and 'home', appeals to the nation. So what do Hardt nad Negri say about the nation?
They say that:
The nation is a kind of ideological shortcut that attempts to free the concepts of sovereignty and modernity from the antagonism and crisis that define them. National sovereignty suspends the conflictual origins of modernity (when they are not definitively destroyed), and it closes the alternative paths within modernity that had refused to concede their powers to state authority. (p.95)
The conflictual orgins of modernity in Australia were the destruction of the indigenous peoples. Hardt and Negri then add:
The process of constructing the nation, which renewed the concept of sovereignty and gave it a new definition, quickly became in each and every historical context an ideological nightmare. The crisis of modernity, which is the contradictory co-presence of the multitude and a power that wants to reduce it to the rule of one----that is, the co-presence of a new productive set of free subjectivities and a disciplinary power that wants to exploit i----is not finally pacified or resolved by the concept of nation, any more than it was by the concept of sovereignty or state. The nation can only mask the crisis ideologically, displace it, and defer its power. (p. 97)
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Gary, I read through the section in Multitude last night about revolutions being the process of increasing democratisation. Even the structure of the guerilla groups are more democratised than the systems they are opposing.
I think that has merit.
Seen in the light of the republic referendum in 1999, the political class didnt offer anything that would increase freedom or democratic involvement in the process.