As part of our Academic chat series, we are pleased to present a very special event: a chat with Antonio Negri, a political prisoner in Rome, and Michael Hardt, assistant professor of literature at Duke , about their new book, EMPIRE. Imperialism as we know it may be no more, but Empire is alive and well -- and, according to Hardt and Negri, Empire is the new political order of globalization. We commemorate May 1st, International Workers' Day, by joining Hardt and Negri to discuss their global perspective.
Peter from bn.com: Hello, Michael and Antonio, welcome to bn.com. We are very pleased that we could do this on May 1st! First question: Where are you?
Antonio Negri: I am speaking from my apartment in Rome.
Michael Hardt: I am in North Carolina.
Peter from bn.com: I am interested in the process of collaboration between the two of you, especially in light of the transcontinental connection. Is there any reason you chose to have the book come out in American English?
MH: We worked together on all of the texts in the sense that we didn't divide up chapters. What we did was exchange drafts, so that all of the material in the end was written equally by both of us. Because of Toni's legal situation, this required my going to Europe several times a year -- first France, and then Italy -- in order to collaborate face to face.
AN: I think that the problem with collaboration is defined by the way we had already worked together, for and from the beginning, principally on American questions. Simply the fact of working on American material for a European intellectual is enriching from both perspectives. As to why the book came out in English, the response is very banal: American English is the most simple and direct way to have one's ideas circulate around the world.
Peter from bn.com: I am struck by how eclectic, in a positive sense, the conceptual field of Empire is in terms of the multiple sources it draws on, from Spinoza to Marx and A THOUSAND PLATEAUS. At the same time, it is so positive, wasting so little time on the direct critique of liberal ideology. How would you like to see others use your concepts?
AN: First, the question of how the concepts would be used: We have nothing to say or dictate as to how readers respond. This should be left up to them. Regarding eclecticism: Eclecticism today has taken on a new critical value. It is something like what Kant described as the conflict among the faculties. And thus this conflict translates today as a struggle among the academic disciplines to destroy any communication. It develops in such a way that the various disciplines -- mathematics, economics, etc. -- have developed boundaries so that it is impossible for them to communicate. I mean that today one has to intervene to destroy and confound the differences and distinctions among them. One example is the mathematical structure of contemporary economics and how it has become completely detached from the ability to understand the economy -- and thus our entire insistence on "bio-politics" -- our concept of bio-power follows strictly Foucault's conception of Kant's conflict among the faculties. I think we need to open a new discussion about the faculties, even the academic faculties or disciplines, and that all problems of bio-politics lead us toward overcoming the old academic divisions.
MH: Regarding positivity: It is certainly our intention to present a positive critical account, because we think that what contemporary discussion needs to do is not only critique the present state of affairs but to outline an emerging alternative.
Cynthia P. Kelly from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: How can socialism (and Marxism in particular) help us to reach a praxis of absolute democracy?
AN: We first have to make a distinction. Socialism means, simply, "from each according to his capacity." And communism, in contrast, "to each according to his needs."
MH: In this sense, absolute democracy is the foundation of communism. This is the sense in which we understand a non-representative form of communism, or rather a communism that is outside of representation.
Franca Giordano from Milano: Non ho letto il libro (sar tradotto in italiano?) una domanda a entrambi: Sono una mamma di 45 anni e molti anni fa sono stata comunista. Ha ancora senso oggi credere in una idea che ha mosso milioni di uomini e donne in tutto il mondo? (I have been a communist for many years. Does it still make sense to believe in an idea that has moved millions of men and women across the world?)
AN: I can't answer a question of faith or belief, but I think it is reasonable to be communist today -- today more than ever, when our society lives off of a common sense; that is, a common constitution. Today, relationships of labor and social relationships are more common than they were before. And that's why the commonality that lives within both intellectual labor and other labor becomes ever important.
B. Weber from Austria: You define Empire as the universal rule of capital, without a center. But the European Union and the U.S. still seem to be engaged in a struggle for dominance against each other, as one can tell from the introduction of the euro as a rival international currency and the European attempts to create their own European defense body. How do you interpret this battle? (I must admit that up to now I just got to the middle of your book, so excuse me if you tackled that question in your work.)
MH: When we understand Empire as a global constitution, that does not exclude the fact that there remain today national and internationa entities that control currency, economic flow, and production. Our concept of Empire is based on the notion of mixed constitution that incorporates national, local, and international organisms within a supranational and in fact global order. It is still of extreme importance to struggle with and against powers of nation-state and the international entities, such as the European Union. But also, we have to recognize the ultimate sovereignty of the new order on a global scale.
Michele Genchi from Roma: Caro Professore, essersi arresi al mercato, mi fa pensare che molte delle lotte dei nostri anni hanno avuto il sapore amaro di un annuncio triste lasciato perdere, e che molte delle cose che abbiamo gridato per strada hanno avuto un senso. L'eredita positiva e' quella di avere educato i nostri figli alla solidarieta e a un'atteggiamento distaccato verso la poverta intellettuale di questi tempi. Non crede, Professore, che avremmo, forse, potuto fare di piu? Osare di piu? (Dear Professor, many of the struggles of our years had the bitter taste of a sad announcement, and that many of the things that we yelled in the streets had a sense. The positive heritage is that we educated our children in solidarity and an attachment toward the intellectual poverty of our times. Don't you think, professor, that we could have perhaps done more? Dared to do more?)
AN: It doesn't seem to me that the question deals with Empire specifically, but one can respond. If the question is simply "could one do more?" then the answer is yes, one could, and one could push Empire further. Pushing Empire further first meant making the Soviet Union fall; it means making international struggles stronger from the beginning; and it means attacking the nation-state and its abilities to block the movement of people; it means opening borders, etc. We have only been able to do this partially. But at least in Europe we were able to bring about the collapse of the factory regime, and this was a fundamental factor driving toward globalization.
Thomas Atzert from Frankfurt, Germany: A great hello to both of you! Slavoj Zizek, in an essay that was published also here in Germany, wrote about your book that it is nothing less than THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO for the 21st century. So do you think that the immaterial workers of today are a universal class as well as the proletarians Marx had before his eyes back in 1848?
MH: If the immaterial workers are to be conceived as a universal subject of labor today, one has to work hard to expand the notion of what it means to be immaterial labor. It refers only to the fact that many products or many elements of products remain immaterial, not of course that labor itself has become completely immaterial. Today, production takes place equally across our body, our brains, our effects, and indeed all the forces of life. .
Ron Day from University of Oklahoma: In the section of EMPIRE published recently in Multitudes, you write of communication guiding and channeling the imagination and modernity as a whole. I'm wondering if you can elaborate on this. Does "communication" here mean communicational devices? An ideology of communication/ information? A rhetorical/aesthetic form that may be understood today as "communication" or "information"? Thanks for your work.
MH: Indeed, we understand communication in a very broad sense to include not only technological apparatuses, but also human exchanges. One concept that is fundamental to us in considering this problematic is Marx's concept of general intellect. By general intellect we understand the social cooperation of knowledge that extends well beyond the level of the individual that is directly productive in many of today's production practices. We need to understand the productivity of communication in collective and social terms.
Margo from Rockville: What steps would you like to see the IMF and World Bank take?
MH: There are two elements that seem most interesting to me about the demonstrations in Washington against the IMF and the World Bank. The first is the new intelligence of the protesters: the fact of choosing these supranational organisms as the object of protest is something fundamentally new. While many of those who were unsympathetic were critical of the protesters' lack of knowledge of the inner workings of the IMF and World Bank, I find it impressive and hopeful that such a large group of young people has identified these agencies as the object of protest. The second thing I find interesting: The protests, though not united, are by and large not about globalization, despite news reports; the protesters instead are asking for an alternative globalization, a democratic globalization. And that, in fact, is the primary goal of our project, too. So in this sense we watch the protesters with great interest.
AN: What seems to me fundamental is to make an exodus away from these institutions and to lessen their power by moving away from them in order to struggle for a different kind of relationship. The problem is not to try to make these institutions democratic, but to construct democracy otherwise.
Ken from New York: EMPIRE is an impressive book that challenges much of what we have understood as important in postcolonial theory and a variety of critical Marxisms from the Third World. In your book there is little discussion of accumulation, a topic that postcolonial and Third World intellectuals have insisted is important. Can you tell us about what the new dimensions of the process will become?
AN: We didn't write a treatise on political economy, but tried to grasp the general outlines of our postcolonial and postnational realities. Therefore, the concept of accumulation was not at the center of our analysis. Certainly one can and should imagine a concept of accumulation within our framework that would be defined as the entire ensemble of social labor, both material labor and immaterial labor that is organized today. To me it seems that at this point we can only understand accumulation as a preamble to a communist constitution of society. To be frank and clear: Empire exploits the maximum cooperation of society for accumulation; it exploits the foundation of communism.
Peter from bn.com: We tend to associate empire, historically, with rise, decline, stability, breakup. But you seem to suggest that a true return to the local is no longer possible or desirable. Do you think that there are forms of social organizations that can be nonexploitative and yet function globally?
AN: I'm not sure I understood the question, but it seems to me that the defense or return of the local on one hand, and the proposition of a global alternative on the other, are not really contradictory. They could perhaps become contradictory, but for the moment the struggles against the centralization of imperial power have kept this dynamic open, as Seattle and Washington, D.C. demonstrated, and as is also demonstrated by the struggles in Italy in recent days.
MH: The demonstrations in Seattle and Washington, D.C. were remarkable for the way they brought together what seemed previously to be unrelated or antagonistic perspectives: environmentalist groups, organized labor groups, anarchists. In these demonstrations we saw, and perhaps haven't yet understood, how the local and the global today manage to coincide.
Moderator from bn.com: I'd like to know what's on the horizon for both of you. What can we expect next from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri -- either as a collaborative effort or solo?
AN: I just published a book entitled ALMA VENUS, which was written in prison. It is a reflection on some of the concepts that emerged in EMPIRE. Together, however, our present problematic has to do with bio-politics, and how within the bio-political order we can understand the concept of organization; that is, in what way we can understand the new social struggle or revolution. The question then is a matter of recognizing the emergence of powerful organizations, and really a question in our terms of how to organize exodus.
MH: In addition to that, I'm working on my own study of the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Peter from bn.com: Can you please explain for us the concept of "exodus" as it has been discussed this afternoon and in your work?
MH: By "exodus" we want to indicate the form of struggle that is based not in direct opposition but in a kind of struggle by subtraction -- a refusal of power, a refusal of obedience.
AN: Not only a refusal of work and a refusal of authority, but also emigrations and movements of all sorts that refuse the obstacles that block movement and desire. And thus the fact of recognizing ourselves as citizens of the world. And not only that, but also to recognize ourselves as poor. [laughs]
Moderator from bn.com: Poor in the sense that the slave leaving Egypt must leave with nothing.
MH: Exactly.
AN: There is not only weakness in such poverty, but a great strength.
Peter from bn.com: Thank you both for joining us this afternoon. Before we sign off, do you have any final thoughts for the online audience?
AN: The concept of Empire and all the other hypotheses that we make are meant to reveal the present state of order, but this isn't what's really important. What's really important is the Augustinian idea of two cities; that is, Exodus on one hand (fleeing the corrupt city of power), but also constructing a New City. Now we're in the stage where we can't yet see its outline. We are crossing borders and haven't yet arrived.