Empire (Paperback)

This is a powerfully synthesising, scholarly, impassioned, and for many no doubt an uplifting work. It is of the genre of Fukuyama's The End of History, which in its conservative politics and bad philosophy gets much wrong but whose basic point we fret might ultimately be right. The object of Empire, however, is to show not the improbability of anything beyond unversal capitalism, but the immanence of its opposite, namely, Marx's famous 'the end of pre-history', marked by peoples' collective control over lives hitherto entrapped in the service of private profit.

Whether it will convince is another matter. Flattering some but intimidating others, an obstacle will be its cosmic abstractions and prose in places suggesting its authors also harbour something against the English language; heavy weather is made of ideas clear enough without their post-structuralist trappings and there are passages, the more where portents of postmodernism are read into classical literatures, likewise risking the stock Anglo-Saxon complaint of Contintental pretension. Fashionable and widely debated it will be, and of a book exuding analytical verve, moral optimism and sustained political intelligence, making the reader - agreeing or not - appreciatively grin, thankfully so much the better. Its shortcoming will be found in imprecision exactly what it wishes to convince us of.

Begin this taxing book, this reader suggests, in the middle (Section 3.4), with its eloquent synopsis - the anchor of the argument - of the profundity of changes being wrought by post-industrialization. What follows is that received, more especially Marxist, categories must adapt accordingly. The industrial proletariat, while by no means gone, is in a sphere subordinate to now vastly enlarged 'immaterial' labour - labour whose produce is essentially mental and/or affective. What Empire sees in its underpinning 'informatization' - elaborating Marx's forecast of a 'general intellect' - is just that socialization of labour which, for the authors as for Marx, anticipates a society rid of capitalism and which now augers to be its subversive agent. Enveloping 'empire' is premised on the widest diffusion of knowledge and competencies; it markets visions of heavenly possibilities; it tends to the flattening of geographic, racial, ethnic, sexual and linguistic boundaries; it forces or draws great numbers into mobility and migrations; it globalizs communications and founds dense networks of mass interrelationships; it jumbles - 'hybridizes' - cultural, national, occupational and life-style identities; its values seep into every corner. What Empire compresses into changed 'subjectivities' are consequences rightly in the centre of its case, and it lucidly argues that, at bottom, they brought the downfall of Soviet communism.

These new 'subjectivities' indeed point to a different future. But that 'empire' should be conceived as an alternative paradigm to imperialism remains doubtful and may in the end prove politically unhelpful. Both are emanations of capitalism and, not impossibly, history may see them not as colliding but mutually reinforcing. Empire seems too unconscious of the now kaleidoscopic ways of 'desiring' and looking at the world, i.e., of just those unrevolutionary mentalities of which capitalism is its author and 'empire' its illuminating description.

However, no fantasy is proposed of a coming abrupt transfer from capitalist to worker. Empire's focus is on movements in real world productive capacities and what they appear to necessitate for the breakdown of national and cultural barriers and for increased possibilities of loci of instabilities, of mass rejection, refusal, rebellion and solidarities. For all but ultra-revolutionaries, the world, notwithstanding the horrors we daily witness, is a better place; better on the one side that capitalism is - what Marx foresaw - an engine of wealth creation without precedent; better on the other only because the cruel logic of accumulation has been thwarted, re-directed, paradoxically enhanced, by the myriad struggles and skilled labours of poeople, in metropolis and dominions, at once it beneficiaries and victims.

Too little pointed-up perhaps is the massive extent to which, even allowing for bulk and politically sanctioned theft, corporate business, transnational or otherwise, is already in the domain of the public - administered and ministered to - and thereby moot whether capitalism is less constitutive of post-industrial society than that it is clamped, heavily cocooned and the more irrelevantly on top. Empire is absolutely right in its aside that boardroom opponents of Big Government should be on their knees praying for its perpetuation. For Hardt and Negri the public - the 'multitude' -is already Emperor and doesn't yet know it, and their optimism is in their implication of how little it might take to push the corporate fatcats finally off the hill.