A book by a left-wing academic and an Italian prisoner is taking the United States by storm
Ed Vulliamy
How often can it happen that a book is swept off the shelves until you can’t find a copy in New York for love nor money? The library’s edition is reserved for the foreseeable future. Amazon’s promise that the volume “usually ships within 24 hours” is rendered absurd. The publisher has sold out.
Such intense interest is strange since Empire is hardly a blockbuster; it is a dense, 500-page tome by an American academic, Michael Hardt, and a jailed Italian revolutionary. Stranger still because the book rehabilitates the C-word, “communism”, along the corridors of respectable academe and on to the streets of Genoa, venue for this week’s Group of Eight summit.
It is matter of Zeitgeist. Hardt, with his co-author Antonio Negri, has become the unwitting sage (and critic) of the movement thrown up by protests in Seattle, Prague and Gothenberg and written a book about the theme dominating us: globalisation.
But Hardt has done more. Last week The New York Times was quoting eminent professors describing it as “nothing less than a rewriting of the Communist Manifesto for our time” and the first “great new theoretical synthesis of the new millennium”.
Empire is a sweeping history of humanist philosophy, Marxism and modernity that propels itself to a grand political conclusion: that we are a creative and enlightened species, and that our history is that of humanity’s progress towards the seizure of power from those who exploit it.
In saying this, Hardt and Negri have detonated a debate “not against the post-Seattle movement, but within it” proclaiming a number of heresies, including a defence of modernity and the argument that the globalised economy presents a greater opportunity than ever for humanist and even “communist” revolution.
Empire does three things: first, it examines the global economy, the Empire, and finds that it has no centre it is a “non-place”. Or, as Hardt says in conversation: “There is no longer a Winter Palace” (as stormed by the Bolsheviks in 1917).
Second, it redefines what was called the “working class” or “proletariat” as a new, diverse and potent “Multitude”.
Third and here’s the crunch Hardt and Negri scorn the Marxist left’s doom-laden stagnation over two decades. They say the “post-modernised global economy”, far from being all-powerful, contains the seeds of its own destruction, and that the climate has never been more favourable for uprising by “communism which is Marxist, but bigger than Marx”. In short, the decline of the Empire has begun and the revolution against it is in progress.
Hardt and Negri frequently diverge from left-wing orthodoxy. For example, this holds that the global economy is centred on the United States and controlled by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund or a clutch of corporations. Hardt argues there is no place of power and describes this as “a smooth space … both everywhere and nowhere. Empire … is a non-place.”
In conversation, he makes an analogy to the seamlessness of the Web: “The organising principle is similar to the principle of the Internet it links the Internet age to the way power functions as a distribution network.” Even the “North-South divide” doesn’t work “there is Third World in the First World and First World in the Third World Brazil is the ideal example”.
Hardt’s refusal to treat the US as enjoying more than a “privileged position” within the Empire has drawn criticism. “But,” he says, “one of the primary questions we had to begin with was dissatisfaction with ‘US Imperialism’ as a way to name the contemporary world order.”
In Hardt and Negri, the proletariat has become the global multitude. “I keep thinking of fast-food workers in McDonald’s all over the world,” says Hardt, “who wear a badge saying ‘Service with a Smile.'” But there are stirrings within this “multitude”, says Hardt, that reach beyond its smiling servitude to the Empire.
So, even if the Empire is “a more elusive system of exploitation” than its predecessor, he says, “it also, simultaneously, creates more potential for wider cooperation and connections between people, which are the preconditions for liberatory movements”.
And so, says Hardt, the flip side of globalisation is that those it exploits have “a greater potential for commonality among each other. The possibility of the recognition of the multitude is dependent on us seeing our commonality as humans … Global capital makes that possible in the same way that industrial capital made possible the organisation of the industrial working class. It didn’t make the [communist] party but it made the party possible.”
The party? Or the party? In Genoa, both will take to the streets, unless the Empire strikes back first.
@World in brief
l A Concorde jet took off from Heathrow on Tuesday for the first time since the supersonic fleets of British Airways and Air France were grounded following the Paris air crash last year in which 113 people died.
l The Bush administration is planning to test a space-based missile defence system the first step towards “weaponising” space as early as 2005, according to a senior United States defence official.
l Japan had admitted to using overseas aid to buy votes for the resumption of commercial whaling at the International Whaling Commission.
l Three Rwandan Hutus, including the former minister of finance, Emmanuel Ndindabahizi, were arrested in Switzerland, Belgium and Holland for genocide and crimes against humanity in Rwanda in 1994.
l A white Zimbabwean farmer who ran over a black squatter is to be charged with murder. Police allege the man drove at the victim because he was among a group trying to occupy his farm. But the farmer’s neighbours say he panicked when confronted with a threatening crowd.
l Fifty-two men appeared in a Cairo court on Wednesday for the start of Egypt’s biggest ever gay trial. The men face three to five years in jail. Although homosexuality is not outlawed in Egypt, regulations on offending “public morals and sensitivities” are often used against gay men.
l Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina handed over power last weekend to a former chief justice, Latifur Rahman, who will head a caretaker government until a general election in October.
l Switzerland has become the fourth country to find a case of a “mad cow-like” disease in a domestic cat, the Federal Veterinary Office said this week. Scientists who examined the brain of the cat, born in 1995, confirmed it had feline spongiform encephalopathy.
@What’s the plan?
A SECOND LOOK
Gregory Mthembu-Salter
MAP-Omega is a fusion of the Millenium Partnership for the African Recovery Plan (MAP), crafted by President Thabo Mbeki, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade’s similar-but-less-about-democracy Omega plan. The plan’s new working title is the New African Initiative.
The heart of MAP-Omega is a pledge by African heads of state to take ownership of Africa’s recovery, followed by an appeal to the world to work with them in doing so.
The plan unambiguously endorses globalisation but argues that it should be “managed” through “a new global partnership” based on shared responsibility and mutual interest. The partnership should aim to end Africa’s economic marginalisation and poverty.
MAP-Omega’s measurable objectives are to achieve average gross domestic product growth in Africa of more than 7% a year for the next 15 years and to meet the United Nations’s international development goals for poverty reduction, health, education, gender equality and environmental sustainability.
African countries can do some of this with existing resources, but MAP-Omega says US$64-billion a year is needed from outside.
The plan’s authors are painfully aware of widespread Afro-pessimism, but point to positive developments in some African countries conceding these are “uneven and inadequate”, but arguing that implementing the plan would consolidate and accelerate the gains already made.
In making its case for a new partnership, MAP-Omega offers an incentive and a warning: that Africa could be a lucrative market for the rest of the world but without radical change more chaos beckons.
MAP-Omega relies on a pledge from African leaders to put their house in order and commits them to a range of good-governance measures. However, there is so far no mention of monitoring the delivery of each head of state on these pledges, or what might be done with those who do not deliver.
It proposes a string of initiatives, each with a task team attached, which will deliver costed recommendations to a heads-of-state implementation committee within six months.
While containing much that anyone concerned about Africa would readily applaud, MAP-Omega has been criticised as a worthy statement of intent, to be debated by heads of state at summits and then forgotten once they are home. This is why monitoring and sanction mechanisms, which involve sovereignty-pooling of the kind national leaders invariably detest, will prove crucial to MAP-Omega’s credibility.
But by inducing leaders to sign up to its commitments, MAP-Omega has opened the way for the monitoring and accountability of Africa’s leaders at an inter-governmental level. If that started to happen, the world really would sit up and take notice.