>Someone wrote the other day:
How amusing. Doug is afraid to mention my name like in Beetlejuice. Everybody knows that if you say "Proyect" 3 times in rapid succession, the gates of hell will open up and engorge the U. Mass economics department. In any case, the news he posted on undergraduates is reassuring. It is their flag-waving liberal professors, however, who I really worry about. BTW, here's what one of the vanguard elements of the undergraduate population has to say on the good Toni Negri. --- First of all, I don't even understand what the hell language Negri is speaking. In terms of "exodus" and "multitudes" and "molecular characters" and "bio-power" his responses read like Scripture on steroids. If you pick up an article by say Zinn or Chomsky (with some concentration), you can quickly understand their points, examples, overall arguments, all of that. Instead with Negri, he seems to be stuck on the theoretical-masturbationist plane of thought; he practically doesn't even mention any concrete events of the war on terror, their weight and impact, anything. I suppose I should be used to this now, especially as I have a friend in Texas who takes classes with Harry Cleaver, but it never ceases to amaze me. "What is absolutely new with respect to the book's structure is the fact that the American reaction is configuring itself as a regressive backlash contrary to the imperial tendency. It is an imperialist backlash within and against Empire that is linked to old structures of power, old methods of command, and a monocratic and substantialist conception of sovereignty that represents a counter tendency with respect to the molecular and relational characters of the imperial bio-power that we had analysed." Translation: we were wrong about the death of imperialism, we were wrong about the (un)importance of the state, we were wrong to hold 'globalization' as a messiah that 'transcended' capitalism as a whole. "But to think that Bush's government is America does not make any sense. Despite all that is happening, American society is still a completely open machine. Therefore even if Bush's project is monocratic and imperialist it is wrong to regard the United States as such as monocratic and imperialist." This is like tautology in reverse. How is American society an "open machine" in any social or political sense of the word in regards to tolerance of radical opinions? Earlier he says there is no countervailing tendency to the media. If it is open in the sense that there are better capitalists out there who are more farsighted than Bush that can take over, it is not at all clear how this waves away imperialism. It seems to me that reality has contradicted Empire's thesis, so Negri has invented a 'contradiction' whereby his principle stands on one side, with the full weight of postmodernism behind it (read: none), and some especially reactionary and unsavory group of capitalists just happen to currently occupy the other side, the removal of which will end imperialism. This obsession with 'transcending' the boundaries of the nation-state as an assumption for all analysis leaves something to be desired. In the Cold War, the West formed supra-national organizations to strangle the birth of socialist movements whenever and wherever possible. But in the absence of a big countervailing power, the most powerful Western country, on a political level, has no real reason to tie itself down. In a sense America is maneuvering against Europe to gain further control of energy and oil reserves, though Negri treats this as if it is a very strange occurence. This trend called autonomist Marxism sounds like the GQ and Croquet Club of anarchism. M. Junaid Alam Louis Proyect www.marxmail.org
