Empire, or multitude Transnational Negri John Kraniauskas With the publication of Empire,* the oeuvre of the the authors offer us ʻnothing less than a rewriting Italian political philosopher and critic Antonio Negri of The Communist Manifesto for our timeʼ which – until recently an intellectual presence confined to ʻring[s] the death-bell not only for the complacent the margins of Anglo-American libertarian Marxist liberal advocates of the “end of history”, but also for thought – has been transported into what is fast pseudo-radical Cultural Studies which avoid the full becoming an established and influential domain of confrontation with todayʼs capitalismʼ. One effect of transnational cultural theory and criticism. Michael such praise, however, is that Empire is freighted with Hardtʼs mediating role, as translator of key texts by the difficult task of having to live up to itself, as its Negri and other radical Italian intellectuals (such as eulogists have portrayed it. Paulo Virno), and now as co-author of Empire itself, There is some truth in the words (become advertising) has been crucial over the years in helping to establish of these critics. On the one hand, Empire is indeed a and maintain his reputation. Published by Harvard grand work of synthesis, but a synthesis primarily of University Press, the book comes to us with the stamp the work of Negri himself. Over approximately thirty of approval of important contemporary critics – politi- years of writing, much of it spent in prison and exile, cal philosopher Étienne Balibar, subalternist historian Negri has creatively engaged with: transformations in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Marxist cultural critic Fredric the forms of capital accumulation, class recomposition Jameson, urban sociologist Saskia Sassen, Slovenian and working class ʻself-valorizationʼ; the writings of critic-at-large Slavoj Žižek and novelist Leslie Marmon Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Silko – whose words dazzle the potential reader from amongst others; and the political philosophy of Spinoza the bookʼs dust jacket. Empire is presented by them and Machiavelli, as well as subsequent theories and as ʻan amazing tour de forceʼ (Balibar), ʻirresistible, practices of revolution and state sovereignty. This has iconoclastic … [r]evolutionary, even visionaryʼ (Silko), been largely ignored in the Anglo-American academy. and ʻwith enormous intellectual depthʼ (Sassen). It is With Hardt, himself an insightful reader of contem- ʻone of the most brilliant, erudite, and yet incisively porary French philosophy and Italian political theory, political interpretations to date of the phenomenon Negri has now extended this conceptual labour into called “globalization”ʼ writes Chakrabarty; and more the heart of the globalized present characterized, they – ʻThe first great new theoretical synthesis of the new suggest, by an emerging postcolonial and post-impe- millenniumʼ, according to Jameson, ʻa comprehensive rialist ʻglobal form of sovereigntyʼ: Empire.1 On the new historical narrative, which is both a critique of a other hand, although no doubt written enthusiastically wide variety of contemporary theory and a prophetic and with a rather curious image of the political subject call for energies to comeʼ. Thus Empire arrives as (or ʻmilitantʼ) in mind, the work clearly is not, like a prepackaged intellectual event imprinted with its Marx and Engelsʼs Communist Manifesto, the founding status as both a galvanizing political document and a text of a political party, an organizational form with fundamental critical diagnosis of contemporary global which – at least in so far as it internalizes an image of capitalism. Few works of radical criticism have been the state into its practice – Negri has little sympathy. so well ʻplacedʼ in the intellectual market. For Žižek, Moreover, the transformations in the communicative, * Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2000. xvii + 478 pp., £21.95 hb., 0 674 25121 0. Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) 29 affective and knowledge bases of ʻimperialʼ capital to supplement an incomplete Marx to make good a and labour which Negri and Hardt outline, as well as perceived lack, either with regard to his discussion of the critical intentionality of their conceptualization labour or, as we shall see below, in his philosophical (as they transform Marx on value and Foucault on approach to the state. Rather, first, he restores his- power), brings the work into close contact with the torical relativity to ideas like ʻvalueʼ and ʻcoopera- concerns of contemporary cultural studies. The works tionʼ, transforming them internally so as to address of Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson and Gayatri Spivak the present – in this case, by extending the idea of immediately come to mind in this regard. Arguably, social labour (and social capital) beyond the bounds the work of translation involved in the co-authorship of Marxʼs critical horizon constituted by the factory of Empire precisely entails making Negri readable in system of machinofacture. In Negriʼs periodization this new milieu.2 this, now past, social organization of labour begins in 1848 and ends around 1968. Second, and here Negri Value and refusal reads the Marx of the Grundrisse against the Marx Negriʼs writing comes in large measure from the of Capital, he endows the historical subject of both particular experience of the Italian New Left, character- value and social cooperation – living labour – with a ized by both state and anti-statist political violence, founding ontological force. amidst a generalized crisis of political representation From this point of view, labour power is both that extended into the working class, the perceived heteronomous and autonomous, object and subject: it betrayals of the Italian Communist Party (the ʻhistori- is made (as labour), but it makes (as power). Together, cal compromiseʼ), and the mushrooming of a multitude political ontology bolstered by historical critique of radical social-movement-based political organiza- produce Negriʼs metaphysical re-vision of Marxism, tions. Some of these fed into quite powerful armed which goes so far as to suggest that the form of value groups such as the Red Brigades, whilst others created – as the ʻmaterial representationʼ of social coopera- the political movement with which, theoretically at tion, exploitation and the positivity of labour – is ʻthe least, Negri is most associated: Autonomia.3 As is well transcendental material of a determinate societyʼ, and known, in Italy the events of 1968 actually began in that as a critical concept it has ʻa higher ontological 1967, and lasted well into the 1970s. It was probably intensity than the simple mode of productionʼ. This the sustained character of the crisis, combined with is because in it the economic, the juridical and the political marginalization, that brought Negri and his ideological are all ʻgathered under the category of intellectual circle into more or less direct contact with the politicalʼ. Gramsciʼs attempts at thinking across, transformations in the labour process that were to be rather than between, base and superstructure in the analysed later, elsewhere, as post-Fordism, ʻflexible idea of ʻhegemonyʼ is probably influential here. Negri, accumulationʼ or ʻcultural economyʼ.4 The difference in however, refers to Marxʼs analysis of money in the the approach of Negri and his colleagues, however, is Grundrisse, where, in a context of financial crisis that it constitutes what might be considered a genuine ʻthe modern function of value is transformed into a materialist ʻpost-Marxismʼ, a working-through and function of commandʼ, that is, monetary policy. Since development of central critical concepts to be found the ʻstuffʼ of value is abstract labour, the critique of in Capital and the Grundrisse ʻbeyond Marxʼ, rather political economy becomes in Negri a ʻcritique of than an abandonment of their theoretical terrain. From labourʼ.7 this point of view, for example, the so-called ʻnomad- The work of Mario Tronti was crucial in con- ismʼ of contemporary social movements is intimately ceptualizing this double dimension of living labour as tied to the socialization of production as well as ʻlabourʼ and ʻpowerʼ, especially his reflections on the to contemporary reconfigurations and movements of ʻstrategy of refusalʼ. ʻThe working classʼ, he writes, (abstract) labour.5 ʻdoes what it is.ʼ8 In this sense, thinking about what In Negriʼs work, like that of Paulo Virno, Sergio is always the case, in the first instance, rather than Bologna, Franco Piperno, Maurizio Lazzarato and in the last – that is, the ontological primacy of living Michael Hardt, Marxʼs theory of value is interpreted labour – is central to Negriʼs thought. Even at its most as being immediately political.6 In this respect, he prophetic, he writes, historical materialism ʻruns the clearly belongs to that strand of Western Marxist risk of constituting a natural historyʼ of accumulation thought known as ʻpoliticalʼ (rather than ʻculturalʼ) rather than ʻshowing the movements of class struggle Marxism. But, unlike Nicos Poulantzas, for example, in [the] light of catastrophe and innovationʼ. This is or even Lenin and Gramsci, Negri does not attempt Negriʼs subjectivist (and ontologizing) criticism of 30 Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) the objectivist trend in the Marx of Capital.9 What linguistic heterogeneity of their world.13 Conceptu- Tronti calls ʻthe workersʼ articulationʼ is fundamental ally, Empire is such a travel-and-learning-book too: in providing such a view with a historical dimension. it navigates and explores a new world of value – that The working class ʻis, at one and the same time, the is, new social configurations of capital, labour and articulation of capital [as abstract labour] and its dis- power. And although the processes referred to by the solution [as class]ʼ. At one level this is obvious. But, idea of ʻrefusalʼ remain at work in the passages to the he goes on to write, ʻcapitalist power seeks to use the new imperial order as described by Hardt and Negri, workersʼ antagonistic will-to-struggle as a motor of its they have also been transformed and transnationalized.