Hardt & Negri

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire is a comprehensive, if dense, account of the economics, politics and culture of the present era of global capitalism. Since its publication in 2000 it has gained unexpected resonance within the anti-capitalist movement. Yet it is in its view of the nature and goals of the resistance to modern capitalism that Empire jars most completely with the world since the anticapitalist movement came into existence.

In fact, it is a text that has found favour with one specific wing of the movement, the "horizontals", because it opposes the identification of the productive core of the working class as the engine of social change and denies that the organised labour movement should be the centre of the process of resistance.

Empire speaks to, and for, the horizontals because it opposes all concepts of representational leadership in political struggle (i.e. the party) and trusts to a spontaneist development of the political consciousness of all those exploited and oppressed by capitalism. Finally, the ultimate test of any political analysis is its ability to generate a programme that can be used to achieve is goals and realise its values. Yet despite the implied radicalism of its analysis, it adopts a minimum reformist programme.

According to Empire, a new militancy has arisen in recent times. Examples from the 1990s include Los Angeles (1992), Chiapas (1994), France (1995), and South Korea (1996) and what sets these struggles apart from the earlier (1960s and 1970s) generation is that "Each of these struggles was specific and based on immediate regional concerns in such a way that they could in no respect be linked together as a globally expanding chain or revolt. None of these events inspired a cycle of struggles, because the desires and needs they expressed could not be translated into different contexts. . .revolutionaries in other parts of the world did not hear of these events . . . and immediately recognise them as their own struggles." (54)

The best refutation of this view of the post-Cold War struggles lies in recent developments in the real world. There is no mention, not even a hint, of the anti-globalisation or anti-capitalist movement in Empire. The book was no doubt put to press shortly before the momentous events in Seattle at the end of 1999 etched the arrival of this global movement into every progressive's mind.

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