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NEWS & LETTERS, April 2002 

Essay article

The non-dialectical Marxism of Hardt and Negri

by Kevin Michaels

It would be difficult to identify a recent book of radical theory that has gained as much publicity as Michael Hardt's and Antonio Negri's EMPIRE. The book, recently issued in paperback, has been widely reviewed and even appeared in a favorable light in the pages of TIME magazine. Its publisher, Harvard University Press, advertises the book with claims that its popularity makes it impossible to locate on the shelves of bookstores in New York City.

Such attention would be easy to dismiss if the book was intended to appeal to the prejudices of commentators who have written off the idea of revolution. Instead, EMPIRE is a serious essay in revolutionary philosophy and practice. EMPIRE is an important book because it is about ideas and because its authors intend those ideas to be the theoretical basis of a revolutionary movement against capitalism.

EMPIRE is a collaborative effort between Hardt, a literature professor at Duke University and Negri, a radical theorist and foe of the Italian state. Negri was a leading figure of the fierce Italian revolutionary Left of the 1970s called autonomia that threatened the interests of both the corrupt government and the large and conservative Communist Party. He was convicted on flimsy evidence in 1983 of complicity in some of the acts of political violence of the time and fled for his safety to France, where he supported himself for years as a university lecturer and theoretician. He returned to Italy in 1997, hoping in vain that the collapse of the longstanding institutional pillars of Italian politics, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, would permit an amnesty for those falsely convicted of crimes during the tumultuous time referred to as the "years of lead." He is currently serving his sentence under house arrest.

THE THESIS OF EMPIRE

The focus of EMPIRE is on the question of what Hardt and Negri term sovereignty. By this they mean not just the concept of the political power of the nation state, but instead the political and social constitution of the contemporary world. The authors argue that the world has passed from a stage characterized by the model of the imperialism of the old European powers to one in which no single power dominates totally, and yet the world is still totally dominated. The United States plays a leading role in this new arrangement, but sovereignty is shared by a panoply of international political, financial and non-governmental organizations. The authors call this new scheme of things Empire.

This argument is not without its merits. The collapse of the U.S.S.R., the U.S.'s rival pole of power in 1991 did not grant the U.S. untrammeled sway over the entire globe. The U.S. has to contend with entities such as the European Union and its component states as well as strong regional powers like China, while at the same time pursuing a course of internationalism in its own interest through its efforts toward the liberalization of global trade.

Similarly, the international trade and economic bodies the anti-globalization movement expends so much energy in opposing also function as new theaters for contention between state powers. While economic liberalization is the professed agenda of these organizations, the conflicts that take place within them reveal how strong the pressure is to preserve the advantages the long-industrialized countries possess across the economic spectrum, at the expense of what the economists call the "emerging markets."

Furthermore, Hardt and Negri downplay the readiness with which the U.S. rebels against the current of this centerless world order and forces other countries to dance to its tune. The vigor with which the U.S. continues to pursue its anti-terrorist campaign after the September 11 events is the most salient example of the unilateralism of George W. Bush that chafes the leaders of continental Europe so regularly.

ANTI-DIALECTICS

It is ultimately not the thesis of EMPIRE, however, that makes the book problematic. Instead, it is the book's theoretical underpinnings that make it a flawed work.

Hardt and Negri are deeply influenced by the work of two poststructuralist thinkers: Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. It is this influence that places EMPIRE's authors in the awkward but not unprecedented position of being Marxists who are fundamentally at odds with what Marx characterized as the heart of his critique: the Hegelian dialectic.

This hostility is most clearly expressed in the manner in which Hardt and Negri conceive of the positive side of the new state of Empire. They argue that the new globalized forms of sovereignty and capitalist production have brought into existence a new revolutionary subject called the multitude. Because Hardt and Negri have great disdain for all forms of dialectical thinking, especially the important dialectical concept of mediation, they praise how the multitude simply exists. For them, the multitude is great because it just is. The authors believe that Empire has the merit of having dissolved mediations such as the state and that now the multitude can simply confront Empire and, solely through practical experimentation, overcome it.

While Hardt and Negri are full of appreciation of subjectivity and its potential as well as the power of labor as a human category, they reject the negative power of these concepts. Labor for the authors is "the living power of being" (p. 468, note 4) rather than the negative process by which the subject changes the objective world and, in turn, is changed by the same world he or she helped to create. They fault Marx's theory of value as being a theory of measure and argue instead that labor is beyond measure. This non-dialectical conception ignores the concept of value as itself a mediation, one created by humans in a historical process and one that will be in turn overcome by humans in a continuation of that process.

The manner in which Hardt and Negri describe the immeasurability of labor is in fact the same manner in which Marx, in the GRUNDRISSE (the chief source for the "Marx beyond Marx" to which Negri is committed to developing) describes labor "when the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away," that is, when the mediation of value has itself been mediated.

The authors' claim that Marx's theory of value has been made obsolete by Empire is in keeping with their belief that "reality and history...are not dialectical" (p. 131). While they make explicit their desire to go beyond Marx, their hostility to dialectical thinking undermines any claim on their part of continuity with his work. In any case, the continuity they most explicitly discuss is one with the compromised word "communist." It is ironic that Negri, a revolutionary distinguished by his lifelong opposition to the theory and practice of the Italian franchise of official Communism, should make a statement to the effect that all the revolutions of the twentieth century have been victorious (p. 394). They did contain victorious moments, but in truth their heritage is characterized by an important dialectical category: the transformation into opposite.

Without doubt, Guy Debord, the Situationist and dialectician, would object to the enthusiasm with which Hardt and Negri cite his work. Whatever his other faults, Debord had a keen appreciation for the way a concept can be corrupted and pressed into service for a cause at odds with its original purpose. While Hardt and Negri exhibit no interest in the young Marx and his critique of communism for being "not the real form of human development," one would think that the authors would be more sensitive to Debord's concept of the recuperation of ideas than to appropriate a term like "Communism," which is weighted with so much repressive baggage.

HUMANISM

Integral to the Hegelian heritage of Marx that Hardt and Negri reject is humanism. The authors are themselves not hostile to humanism. They have a great appreciation for the emergence of the humanism that was integral to the secularization of society and the birth of science. They commit themselves, however, to a rejection of the humanism that they argue contributed to the emergence of what they describe as the problems of modernity, among them Eurocentrism and colonialism. Because the authors want to overcome the antagonism that postmodern theory has towards subjectivity and humanism, they posit what they term a "materialist telos" that will rescue the early revolutionary humanism for the multitude, ignoring totally however, the explicit humanism of Marx.

The "thoroughgoing naturalism or humanism" of Marx's ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOHIC MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844 is evidently too Hegelian for Hardt and Negri to deal with. The continuity of explicit humanism into the work of the mature Marx is, needless to say, passed over in silence as well.

The sum of these perspectives lacks a concreteness that undermines the entire project the authors champion. For them, the multitude exists and despite the impossibility of communication between individual struggles, it will somehow overcome Empire. What the authors commit to is a list of three demands for the multitude to take up: the right to global citizenship, the right to a guaranteed income and the right to what they call reappropriation, or the control over all the new means of production and communication integral to Empire-in short, what used to be called socialism.

These demands, especially the first one, are worthy ones and if the anti-globalization movement were to take up even one of them, it would represent a significant development. The demands, however, are weakened when simply thrust into the hands of the multitude, which lacks any theoretical understanding about their potential. To the authors, the multitude has achieved its greatness as a result of the contemporary needs of capitalist accumulation and not as a result of any theoretical development of its place in history, its own history, or its potential. The demand for a right to global citizenship-which could be conceded by the part of the bourgeoisie that realizes its own need for the mobility of labor-would have an enormous impact if it was understood as an explicit rejection of the nativism of sections of the official labor movements and the integrality of struggles in highly advanced capitalist countries with those in less advanced ones.

Responsibility for this theoretical development, however, seems to be non-existent. The authors have developed a theory, but the practical experimentation they look forward to is to be undertaken by a figure they call the "militant," an itinerant revolutionary turned loose to play in the nooks and crannies of Empire. The closest the authors come to an organizational framework for this figure is two brief mentions of the American variant of anarcho-syndicalism, the Industrial Workers of the World. A new and more intriguing kind of organization-one distinct from both spontaneous forms of organization that arise out of mass struggles and the vanguard party form that Negri himself helped to overcome in the 1960s-in which theoretical development is itself an animating force, lies outside the scope of the authors' interest.

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