empire and beyond

I MUST read these books: "Empire" (2001) and it's sequel, "Multitude" (2004) written by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, theorizers on the new wave of globalization and its potentially resistant players. I tried to read "Empire" last year but got bogged down with other schoolwork and readings--but I just read a review of their new book and it just sold me all over again to undertaking reading both of them now...

If you think I've lost my marbles by posting so much on this, it's just that I am INCREDIBLY interested in this sort of stuff and wish more people were, too! And I'm sooooo tired of hearing that globalization is "inevitable" and that we must just go along with the total domination of corporations in people's lives--that's total bullshit!

My instructor in my "American Workers and Global Capitalism" class from spring '04 at Stanford posits that even though we use the term "late capitalism" to describe the global economic structure we seem to be in, we are actually in a phase of economics we don't even have a word for yet--that the original term "capitalism" doesn't go as far as it's original phrase and is even beyond the scope of basic Marxist theory. While that may sound a bit like a no-brainer (Iike "yeah, things are more complicated than they were in the industrial revolution--we're more global now") it's even BEYOND that...Like the exponential growth of capitalism and its permeation into every aspect of our lives, our constant producing, consuming, and feeding of the machine now falls outside the boundaries of our basic definitions or how we *think* we understand capitalism...from all the reviews and snippets I've read from "Empire," Hardt and Negri seem to be talking about this current state of affairs, and even try to address the alternatives and resistances they see within it.

These books seem more in line with the conceptual theories of French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (read "A Thousand Plateaus" or "Anti-Oedipus") in the sense that they're not necessarily offering concrete solutions to the problematics of empire, but that they are providing new *frames* in which to think of things--such as the idea of the "multitude" (as opposed to the "proletariat" in the traditional Marxist sense), which consists of non-homogenous alliances and a sort of unified "disunity."

from a review of "Multitude" at Amazon.com:
"Complex, ambitious, disquieting, and ultimately hopeful, Multitude is the work of a couple of writers and thinkers who dare to address the great issues of our time from a truly alternative perspective. The sequel to 2001's equally bold and demanding Empire continues in the vein of the earlier tome. Where Empire's central premise was that the time of nation-state power grabs was passing as a new global order made up of "a new form of sovereignty" consisting of corporations, global-wide institutions, and other command centers is in ascendancy, Multitude focuses on the masses within the empire, except that, where academics Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are concerned, this body is defined by its diversity rather than its commonalities. The challenge for the multitude in this new era is "for the social multiplicity to manage to communicate and act in common while remaining internally different." One may already be rereading that last sentence. Indeed, Empire isn't breezy reading. But for those aren't afraid of wadding into a knotty philosophical and political discourse of uncommon breadth, Multitude offers many rewards. --Steven Stolder"

Empire on Amazon
Multitude on Amazon
a review by Scott McLemee on both "Empire" and "Multitude"


food for thought: below is artist Thomas Hirschhorn's 2002 work made of metallic paper, foam, and tape