My friend Paul just wrote this terrific piece on debates over the Canadian national anthem and the “deflective” politics of the right wing government.

As some of you may know, the Canadian Conservative government, led by Stephen Harper, has suggested this week that it might take a look at revising the lyrics of “O Canada” in order to make them more gender neutral. Specifically, they are looking at replacing Robert Stanley Weir’s line “in all thy sons command” (to my recollection, this line is often rendered as “in all our sons command”), with the line from Adolphe-Basile Routhier’s original poem “thou dost in us command.” I think that in our ongoing effort to recognise the centrality of music and popular culture in social and cultural life, this deserves comment.

This, of course, is a pretty valuable discussion to have, and one with at least a twenty year-old history. Indeed, why should patriotism only be associated with sons and not daughters? While we’re at it though, we ought to take it further and ask important questions about the music that is supposed to represent the people of this country. Let’s look at the French version, and begin the process of eliminating its gender specificity (“nos aieux” = “our forefathers”). Moreover, let’s ask ourselves whether a country whose indigenous population was largely polytheistic, and whose contemporary population is a grand mixture of people of many religious and non-religious backgrounds, needs an anthem that so prominently features the Christian deity, in both languages—they are, after all “His” sons. One step further. Let’s acknowledge the troubled history of national anthems themselves as emerging out of a violent, colonial, oppressive nationalism, a violence that is reflected in “Car ton bras sait porter l’épée” (“As in thy arm ready to wield the sword”). And finally, we might just take this opportunity to re-examine the term “patriot” itself, and acknowledge its Latin and Greek roots: pater =  father.* I’d say that this is one way to harness the debate and hold the Harperites to the letter on this move. Then we can have a proper discussion about the notion of national political and cultural representation.

In a move sure to cause a vivid debate, I certainly don’t take this as a signal that the Harper government has all of sudden put gender issues on the table as part of its message. No. This is the same party and leader who have objected to same sex marriage and benefits for same-sex couples, who advocated disallowing women to appeal for pay equity, oppose national childcare, cut funding to Status of Women Canada, who wage a vicious war on the poor that disproportionately affects women, and who generally espouse conservative “family values”…the list goes on. Changing a word is unlikely to have material effects on the lives of Canadian women or anyone else.

But what is perhaps most subtly disturbing about this is that it comes at the very same time as a federal budget. As politicos are fond of calling it, this is an example of “deflective” politics. DeBord called it spectacle. The idea is to seed a story so perfectly well-suited for “person on the street,” populist “analysis” that members of the mainstream media simply cannot help themselves; they simply HAVE to cover it, it’s news. It’s also much easier to get a reporter out on the street with a microphone to ask people if they think pronouns** ought to be replaced in the national anthem than it is to ask people what they think about, say, a $3.25 a week increase in Child Tax Benefits ($3.25!?), continued promotion of “corporate welfare,” increased efforts in securitisation (which is, interestingly, also  included in a chapter about “Supporting Families and Communities”)…and this list goes on. Especially after the Olympics, this is the perfect topic to deflect attention away from the budget; it is downright entertaining to see people speak passionately about “owning the podium” and how much it meant to “us” to have the national anthem played more times than any other host country had theirs played. It’s significantly less entertaining to have dry economists point out the failings (or successes) of a budget.

By nature a deflective tactic is also presumed to be less important than the issue from which it is supposed to divert attention; one wouldn’t deflect with something more crucial, that would draw unwanted attention. There is rarely any intention to move forward on the actual substance of the deflection. In this case, I think it would be fair to say that there will be a 50/50 split amongst those people polled who care about the issue, it will gain no real political traction, and it will thus have served its purpose as an entertaining piece of theatre.

But I don’t mean to suggest that the issue is not actually important, in fact, I argue the opposite. Using gender as a deflection is further evidence of this government’s contempt for progressive social issues. They have cravenly manipulated the intense feeling of pride held by many who live in this country over the great successes of hard-working, talented athletes; they have instrumentalised the supposed sanctity of the national anthem; and they have trivialised gender issues as a means to deflect attention from a budget that appears at first to be business as usual, but which I am sure, upon further inspection, will yield further damages for people, and further gains for corporate Canada. For me, this shows ultimate disrespect for each of these important issues. In addition to playing classic divisive politics (they are ignoring people affected by the many other problematic issues in the anthem’s lyrics), it seems to me a typically chauvinistic approach to suggest that issues affecting women could be addressed by paying attention to “aesthetics” rather than to material concerns.

* thanks to Valérie Savard for bringing up this point.

** interestingly, this is probably one of the only times we’ll see debate over grammar occupy a front and centre position in the mainstream media!

Scholars U-Turn on School Reform Shakes Up the Debate

“We totally agreed with what she had to say,” said Eugene G. White, superintendent of the Indianapolis Public Schools. “We were amazed to see that she’d changed her tune.”

The superintendents gave Dr. Ravitch a standing ovation.

By SAM DILLON

Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups.

“School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ ” Dr. Ravitch said in an interview.

Dr. Ravitch is one of the most influential education scholars of recent decades, and her turnaround has become the buzz of school policy circles.

“What’s Diane up to? That’s what people are asking.” said Grover J. Whitehurst, who was the director of the Department of Education’s research arm in the second Bush administration and is now Dr. Ravitch’s colleague at the Brookings Institution.

Among the topics on which Dr. Ravitch has reversed her views is the main federal law on public schools, No Child Left Behind, which is up for a rewrite in coming weeks in Congress. She once supported it, but now says its requirements for testing in math and reading have squeezed vital subjects like history and art out of classrooms.

Dr. Ravitch’s new posture has angered critics.

“She has done more than any one I can think of in America to drive home the message of accountability and charters and testing,” said Arthur E. Levine, a former president of Teachers College, where Dr. Ravitch got her doctorate and began her teaching career in the 1970s. “Now for her to suddenly conclude that she’s been all wrong is extraordinary — and not very helpful.”

Admirers say she is returning to her roots as an advocate for public education. She rose to prominence in the 1970s with books defending the civic value of public schools from attacks by left-wing detractors, who were calling them capitalist tools to indoctrinate working-class children.

“First she angered the Marxist historians, and later the fans of progressive education and the multiculturalists,” said Jeffrey E. Mirel, a professor of education and history at the University of Michigan. “But she’s always defended public schools and a robust traditional curriculum, because she believes they’ve been a ladder of social mobility.”

Dr. Ravitch was born in Texas and graduated from Wellesley. She gained formidable influence during the Republican-dominated 1980s. In her meticulous office on the top floor of a 19th-century Brooklyn brownstone hangs a photograph of herself, seated next to Vice President Bush during a visit to the White House, directly across from President Ronald Reagan.

In 1991, Lamar Alexander, the first President Bush’s secretary of education, made her an assistant secretary, a post she used to lead a federal effort to promote the creation of state and national academic standards.

Since leaving government in 1993, Dr. Ravitch has been a much-sought-after policy analyst and research scholar, quoted in hundreds of articles on American education. And she has written or edited five books, including “Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform” (2001) and “The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn” (2003), an influential examination of the censorship of school books by left- and right-wing pressure groups.

In her new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” she describes the bipartisan consensus that took root in the early 1990s, with her support, and has held sway since.

“The new thinking saw the public school system as obsolete, because it is controlled by the government,” she writes. “I argued that certain managerial and structural changes — that is, choice, charters, merit pay and accountability — would help to reform our schools.”

In January 2001, Dr. Ravitch was at the White House to hear President George W. Bush outline his vision for No Child Left Behind, which Congress approved with bipartisan majorities and which became law in 2002.

“It sounded terrific,” she recalled in the interview.

There were signs soon after, however, that her views were changing. She had endorsed mayoral control of New York City schools before Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg obtained it in 2002, but by 2004 she had emerged as a fierce critic. Some said she was nursing a grudge because close friends had lost jobs in the mayor’s shake-up of the schools’ bureaucracy.

In 2005, she said, a study she undertook of Pakistan’s weak and inequitable education system, dominated by private and religious institutions, convinced her that protecting the United States’ public schools was important to democracy.

She remembers another date, Nov. 30, 2006, when at a Washington conference she heard a dozen experts conclude that the No Child law was not raising student achievement.

These and other experiences left her increasingly disaffected from the choice and accountability movements. Charter schools, she concluded, were proving to be no better on average than regular schools, but in many cities were bleeding resources from the public system. Testing had become not just a way to measure student learning, but an end in itself.

“Accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools,” she writes. “The effort to upend American public education and replace it with something that was market-based began to feel too radical for me.”

She said she began to feel estranged intellectually from close colleagues.

One she heard criticize the No Child law was Chester E. Finn Jr., a former assistant secretary of education with whom she had written a book and worked at two conservative research groups, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

They were ideological soul mates and just plain chums. Often over the last decade, they were on the phone together or exchanging e-mail messages half a dozen times a day. But although Mr. Finn had become critical of the No Child law, he remained an advocate of charter schools and school choice.

By 2008, Mr. Finn said, “there were more and more issues where the staff and everybody else on the Fordham board would say, ‘Let’s do A,’ and Diane would say, ‘Let’s do B.’ ”

Finally, she recalled, “I told everybody at a dinner meeting at Koret that I was going to resign, and they all said, ‘Come on, stay — we need somebody to argue with us.” Dr. Ravitch stayed on for a time, but left both organizations last spring.

Mr. Finn has done his own rethinking, and he said he shared many of her disappointments.

“Standards, in many places, have proven nebulous and low,” he writes in a coming essay. “ ‘Accountability’ has turned to test-cramming and bean-counting, often limited to basic reading and math skills.”

But Mr. Finn has reached sharply different conclusions from Dr. Ravitch.

“Diane says, ‘Let’s return to the old public school system,’ ” he said. “I say let’s blow it up.”

But Dr. Ravitch is finding many supporters. She told school superintendents at a convention in Phoenix last month that the United States’ educational policies were ill-conceived, compared with those in nations with the best-performing schools.

“Nations like Finland and Japan seek out the best college graduates for teaching positions, prepare them well, pay them well and treat them with respect,” she said. “They make sure that all their students study the arts, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages, the sciences and other subjects. They do this because this is the way to ensure good education. We’re on the wrong track.”

Blame the All powerful Left!

Whatever problems the Democratic Party has, kowtowing to the left is not one of them

Glenn Greenwald

Jan. 20, 2010 |

(updated below - Update II)

I have a contribution this morning to the New York Times examining the Scott Brown victory, and I’ll post the link to it once it’s up.  But for the moment, I want to address two equally moronic themes emerging over the last couple of days which seek to blame the omnipotent, dominant, super-human “Left” for the Democrats’ woes — one coming from right-wing Democrats and the other from hard-core Obama loyalists (those two categories are not mutually exclusive but, rather, often overlap).

Last night, Evan Bayh blamed the Democrats’ problems on “the furthest left elements,” which he claims dominates the Democratic Party — seriously.  And in one of the dumbest and most dishonest Op-Eds ever written, Lanny Davis echoes that claim in The Wall St. Journal:  ”Blame the Left for Massachusetts” (Davis attributes the unpopularity of health care reform to the “liberal” public option and mandate; he apparently doesn’t know that the health care bill has no public option [someone should tell him], that the public option was one of the most popular provisions in the various proposals, and the “mandate” is there to please the insurance industry, not “the Left,” which, in the absence of a public option, hates the mandate; Davis’ claim that “candidate Obama’s health-care proposal did not include a public option” is nothing short of an outright lie).

In what universe must someone be living to believe that the Democratic Party is controlled by “the Left,” let alone “the furthest left elements” of the Party?  As Ezra Klein says, the Left “ha[s] gotten exactly nothing they wanted in recent months.”  The Left wanted a single-payer system, then settled for a public option, then an opt-out public option, then Medicare expansion — only to get none of it, instead being handed a bill that forces every American to buy health insurance from the private insurance industry.  Nor was it “the Left” — but rather corporatist Democrats like Evan Bayh and Lanny Davis — who cheered for the hated Wall Street bailout; blocked drug re-importation; are stopping genuine reform of the financial industry; prevented a larger stimulus package to lower unemployment; refuse to allow programs to help Americans with foreclosures; supported escalation in Afghanistan (twice); and favor the same Bush/Cheney terrorism policies of indefinite detention, military commissions, and state secrets.

The very idea that an administration run by Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel and staffed with centrists, Wall Street mavens, and former Bush officials — and a Congress beholden to Blue Dogs and Lieberdems — has been captive “to the Left” is so patently false that everyone should be too embarrassed to utter it.  For better or worse, the Democratic strategy has long been and still is to steer clear of their leftist base and instead govern as “pragmatists” and centrists — which means keeping the permanent Washington factions pleased.  That strategy may or not be politically shrewd, but it is just a fact that the dreaded ”Left” has gotten very little of what it wanted the entire year.  Is there anyone who actually believes that “The Left” is in control of anything, let alone the Democratic Party?  The fact that Lanny Davis — to prove the Left’s dominance — has to cite one provision that was jettisoned (the public option) and another which the Left hates (the mandate) reflects how false that claim is.  What are all of the Far Left policies the Democrats have been enacting and Obama has been advocating?  I’d honestly love to know.

And then there is the “Blame the Left” theme from Obama loyalists, who actually claim that the Democrats’ problems are due to the fact that the Left hasn’t been cheering loudly enough for the Leader.  I recall quite vividly how Bush followers spent years claiming  that the failings of the Iraq War were not the fault of George Bush — who had control of the entire war, the entire Congress, and the power to do everything he wanted — but, rather, it was all “the Left’s” fault for excessively criticizing the President, and thus weakening both him and the war effort.

To insist that the Democratic Party’s failures are not the fault of Barack Obama — who controls the entire party infrastructure, its agenda, the news cycle, and the health care plan — we now hear from Obama supporters a similar claim:  it’s all the Left’s fault for excessively criticizing the Leader.  A couple of days ago, Josh Marshall promoted — and Kevin Drum endorsed — a post that made this claim:

And we can look no further than Howard Dean, and MSNBC, and Arianna Huffington, and, yes, some columnists at the Times and bloggers here at TPM–you know, real progressives–who have lambasted Obama again and again since last March over arguable need-to-haves like the “public option,” as if nobody else was listening. They’ve been thinking: “Oh, if only we ran things, how much more subtle would the legislation be,” as if 41 senators add up to subtle. Meanwhile the undecideds are thinking: “Hell, if his own people think he’s a sell-out and jerk, why should we support this?”

The reason “the Left” criticized the Iraq War was because . . . they thought it was a bad thing and thus opposed it.  The reason some on the Left have been criticizing the health care plan and other Obama policies (the ones I listed above) is because . . . they think they’re bad things and thus oppose them.  For instance, health care opponents believe that forcing Americans to buy private insurance that they can’t afford and/or do not want is bad policy and will harm the Democrats politically.  That’s what rational citizens do:  they support proposals that they think are good and oppose the ones they think are bad. What are people on “the Left” supposed to do:  go on television and into their columns and lie by pretending they support things that they actually oppose, all in order to sustain high levels of affection and excitement for Barack Obama?  Someone who would do that is what we call a dishonest propagandist and party loyalist, and, in any event, is unlikely to have any credibility with anyone beyond already-converted, fellow Obama admirers.

A political party is actually much healthier and stronger when criticisms of the Leader are permitted.  Ask the Republicans circa 2005 and 2006 about how a party fares when party-loyalty and leader-loyalty trump all other considerations.  Moreover, if a political party adopts a strategy of ignoring its base, as the Democrats routinely do, it’s an inevitable cost that the base will become dispirited and unmotivated.  As Darcy Burner put it yesterday:  ”Perhaps if the Democratic base doesn’t show up to elect Coakley, party leadership should consider *trying to appeal* to the base.”  There’s a reason it’s called “the base” — it’s because it’s the foundation of the party — and, as the Republicans never forget, there is a serious cost to ignoring or spurning them.

As I note in my NYT contribution today, the reasons for the Democrats’ failings generally — and the Scott Brown victory specifically — are complex, and shouldn’t be simplified in order to declare vindication for pre-existing beliefs (Obama loyalists:  it was all about Coakley!; right-wing Democrats:  it’s all the Left’s fault!; Republicans: it’s a rejection of liberalism!).  But whatever else is true, the Left, as usual, has very little power, both within the Party and in general.  Blaming them for the Democrats’ failings is about as rational as the 2006 attempt to blame them for the collapsing Iraq War.  The Left is many things; “dominant within the Democratic Party and our political discourse” is not one of them.

* * * * *

All that said, and as horrible as the Democrats have been all year, the most amazing — and depressing — aspect of all of this is how Americans have so quickly forgotten how thoroughly the Republicans, during their eight-year reign, destroyed the country.  Whatever the source of our national woes are, re-empowering that faction cannot possibly be the answer to anything.

UPDATE:  The NYT forum on last night’s election is here; my contribution is currently at the top.

UPDATE II:  Noting that even reasonable conservatives like Stephen Bainbridge are saying things like: “Obama and the Congressional Democrats (especially in the House) governed for the last year as though the median voter is a Daily Kos fan,” Andrew Sullivan writes:

This must come as some surprise to most Daily Kos fans.  But if one had traveled to Mars and back this past year and read this statement, what would you assume had happened? I would assume that the banks had been nationalized, the stimulus was twice as large, that single-payer healthcare had been pushed through on narrow majority votes, that card-check had passed, that an immigration amnesty had been legislated, that prosecutions of Bush and Cheney for war crimes would be underway, that withdrawal from Afghanistan would be commencing, that no troops would be left in Iraq, that Larry Tribe was on the Supreme Court, that DADT and DOMA would be repealed, and so on.

Exactly.  Of course, none of those things has happened, precisely because the Democrats under Obama (and before) have been doing everything except “governing from the Left.”  But our political discourse, as usual, is so suffuse with blinding stupidity that this clichéd falsehood — Democrats have been beholden to the Left — will take root as Unchallengeable Truth and shape what happens next.  That’s already happening.

From the New York Times:

January 22, 2010

Justices Overturn Key Campaign Limits

By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace will corrupt democracy.

The 5-to-4 decision was a doctrinal earthquake but also a political and practical one. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision, which also applies to labor unions and other organizations, to reshape the way elections are conducted.

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of its conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

Justice John Paul Stevens read a long dissent from the bench. He said the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings. His decision was joined by the other three members of the court’s liberal wing.

The case had unlikely origins. It involved a documentary called “Hillary: The Movie,” a 90-minute stew of caustic political commentary and advocacy journalism. It was produced by Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit corporation, and was released during the Democratic presidential primaries in 2008.

Citizens United lost a suit that year against the Federal Election Commission, and scuttled plans to show the film on a cable video-on-demand service and to broadcast television advertisements for it. But the film was shown in theaters in six cities, and it remains available on DVD and the Internet.

The lower court said the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, usually called the McCain-Feingold law, prohibited the planned broadcasts. The law bans the broadcast, cable or satellite transmission of “electioneering communications” paid for by corporations in the 30 days before a presidential primary and in the 60 days before the general election. That leaves out old technologies, like newspapers, and new ones, like YouTube.

The law, as narrowed by a 2007 Supreme Court decision, applies to communications “susceptible to no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate.” It also requires spoken and written disclaimers in the film and advertisements for it, along with the disclosure of contributors’ names.

The lower court said the film was a prohibited electioneering communication with one purpose: “to inform the electorate that Senator Clinton is unfit for office, that the United States would be a dangerous place in a President Hillary Clinton world and that viewers should vote against her.”

The McCain-Feingold law does contain an exception for broadcast news reports, commentaries and editorials.

When the case was first argued last March, it seemed a curiosity likely to be decided on narrow grounds. The court could have ruled that Citizens United was not the sort of group to which the McCain-Feingold law was meant to apply, or that the law did not mean to address 90-minute documentaries, or that video-on-demand technologies were not regulated by the law. Thursday’s decision rejected those alternatives.

Instead of deciding the case in June, the court set down the case for a rare re-argument in September. It now asked the parties to address the much more consequential question of whether the court should overrule a 1990 decision, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which upheld restrictions on corporate spending to support or oppose political candidates, along with part of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, the 2003 decision that upheld the central provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

On Thursday, the court answered its own questions with a resounding yes.

In some ways this is what the concept of altermodernity is getting at in Commonwealth. For Hardt and Nergi it is not enough to recognize the contradiction within the power relation between modernity and antimodernity. It is not enough to resist. The goal, rather, is to generate new relations and social democratic forms (parallel and intersectional class based, gender, ethnic/indigenous struggles) that cut diagonally across the modern-antimodern threshold. Ultimately, in their chapter on altermodernity and throughout Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri offer a far more dynamic analysis than Zizek, who, whenever confronted with a tight spot often just simply reverts to some sort of grand negative reversal. This brings up a crucial point for me in terms of the broader importance of Commonwealth and the Empire series in general. As Zizek has stated on numerous occasions, himself borrowing from Fredrick Jameson, it is far easier today to imagine the end of human life do to environmental holocaust than even basic transformation of the global capitalist system. This is usually offered within the context of a more general lamentation about how the neoliberal moment exerts tremendous downward pressure on our ability to imagine collective paradigms of social transformation. The precise aim of Commonwealth is to offer a creative design for a new ontology of democratic possibility (a performance of imaginative possibility). This does not mean, of course, that Hardt and Negri should not be subject to critique. In fact as we will see in further posts, critiques of their project were incredibly productive in the formation of this project. It is, however, necessary to consider the dynamic in which critique is offered.

Recently, I have found myself defending Deleuze against people that I think fundamentally misunderstand the nature or point of his project. In my view, Hardt and Negri’s project embodies Deleuze’s insistence that the value of criticism lies in its ability to transform and affect. In each of his books on Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and Spinoza, Deleuze offers plenty of criticism, particularly of Kant, however, these projects are all undertaken in the spirit of pushing the philosophical systems of these thinkers into new territory and in the process simultaneously transforming their projects into something new and dynamic (isn’t this Zizek’s point regarding the Haitian revolution?). Everywhere one peers within Commonwealth, one can locate the stamp of this Deleuzian legacy from their treatment of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, to their deployment of the concepts of love, poverty, and altermodernity. The emphasis is not only to unravel faulty assumptions and open up blockages, but to pave the way for new possibilities for thought and being. My comments here are not in any way to suggest that these concepts along with Hardt and Nergi’s theoretical treatment of the multitude are not without their limitations. It is essential that these limitations be made visible and struggled over. However, if we are to adopt Hardt and Negri’s ethico-political co-ordinates, this process would orient itself toward making these limitations useful in the sense of expanding and sharpening our analytical, ethical, and political attunements. Such an approach seems to me to point toward a way out of the de-politicizing neoliberal deadlock. However, this is precisely what Zizek and others have disingenuously failed to do in their efforts to expel Deleuze from contemporary social and political thought (check out this brilliant analysis by Steven Shaviro of Peter Hallward’s recent assassination attempt)

With all this being said, what are the limitations and possibilities of altermodernity as a conceptual figure of revolutionary praxis? In a sense, it is not possible to fully answer this question from this chapter alone. Many of the points raised in Part 2 are developed in much more theoretical detail in later chapters, and not before running the ideas through their critique of political economy in Part 3. Here, as a preliminary matter, I would like to address three interrelated critiques. First, critics allege that Hardt and Negri inadvertently reproduce a kind of Marxian developmentalist teleology through their claim that global capitalism produces both the “objective” and “subjective” conditions of its own demise. Submerged within this critique is a second one that refers to Hardt and Negri’s apparent messianic tendencies, connected to their supposed “faith” in the affirmative power of the multitude to govern itself in horizontal co-operative networks. Third, there is also a great deal of contempt for the notion of affirmation itself as a critical basis of praxis. Doesn’t such emphasis on creativity and affirmation reproduce neoliberal desiring subjects of capital? How can we effectively combat capital without directly negating it? And on and on….Hardt and Negri directly address the first criticism in Part 2 by engaging historical determinism as a misguided vestige of Marxism’s relationship to modernity (which does not in any way negate validity of Marxism as analysis or basis for political struggle!). In relation, they obliquely address both the first and second criticisms by insisting that the move into altermodernity does not share any determined relationship to the present, however, in those moments where it has emerged (Bolivia, Chiapas, etc) it has already embodied many of the characteristics of the multitude that they describe: horizontal organizational forms and intersectional alliances coupled with various dynamics of social production (i.e. new strategies of collective action, imagination, and political creation). Rather than emerging as historical necessity or existing simply as a utopian revolutionary fantasy, these movements embody concrete manifestations of the multitude as it engages in transforming the political relations in which it is immersed and in the process transforms itself through the generation of new forms of social life. As for the last point, Hardt and Negri take great pains to insist (particularly through their mobilization of singularity and multiplicity which we will take up later in further posts) that political articulations contain potential for furthering either reactionary or liberatory aims. The point of altermodernity is to recognize that the existence of the former need not negate the possibility of the latter as it strives to inaugurate potentials for as yet unimagined ways of thinking and acting with others.

What I would like to say in closing out these scattered remarks is that I am interested in continuing to think about criticism in a way that is generative, that opens up rather than closes down productive possibilities for thinking through new intellectual and ethico-political connections. In further posts this will have to mean bringing our notes of Commonwealth into more of a direct conversation with our own interests and projects.

Part 2: Modernity (and the Landscapes of Altermodernity)

2.1 Antimodernity as Resistance

Power and Resistance Within Modernity

In this section Hardt and Negri problematise the traditional dialectic opposition of modernity/antimodernity. This opposition, they argue, is what gives rise to problematic notions of modernity as an “unfinished project,” inherently good, and simply in need of further advance. They counter the traditional view of modernity as a process of a benign, universalised enlightened European sensibility that civilises an oppositional savage external world, by proposing that modernity itself is dualistic, characterised by the immanent coupling of domination and resistance. The forces of antimodernity, they argue, cannot be seen as being outside modernity but rather internal to it. This means that modernity, for Hardt and Negri, should be seen first and foremost as a power relation. In order to facilitate this ontological shift they first draw on contemporary characterisations of coloniality as a series of “encounters.” Encounters, as opposed to conquests, acknowledge the mutual mixtures and transformations experienced by the coloniser and colonised. Examples given include the adaptation by colonialists to pre-existing spatial layouts of Aztec city states and the influence of Iroquois Federalism on the political history of the United States. The language of encounter misses the violence of coloniality and thus Hardt and Negri continue with a psychoanalytic metaphor: European modernity is “psychotic” because it forecloses the possibility of alternative existences and the influence of the subjugated on the dominant. This is evident in attempts to erase alternate or antimodern histories, which are seen as a threat from the outside, as opposed to being constitutive of modernity itself. Finally, though centre/periphery models come closest to Hardt and Negri’s proposed duality, they run the risk of homogenising both the coloniser and colonised. “The West” is seen as the only “pole of domination,” without internal struggles and resistances, while “the rest” is seen as uniformly subordinate, without it’s own axes of domination. When modernity is understood as a power relation then seeing modernity as an unfinished project is much less benign than is suggested by Habermas and other theorists of social democracy. “More modernity,” Hardt and Negri argue, “is not an answer to our problems.” (71)

Slave Property in the Modern Republic

For Hardt and Negri modernity and republicanism are intimately linked because the republican form of property relations became the dominant form within modernity. Slave property is thus scandalous for the republic because it fundamentally contradicts notions of equality and freedom espoused by the French, American, and English revolutions, yet it forms the cornerstone of emerging republican economies. They ask: if slavery is so antithetical to these foundational notions of republicanism then why did it last so long, “not as a peripheral remnant of the past but as a central sustaining pedestal?” An ideological operation takes place in which republican discourses locate slavery as both an ancient phenomenon and a foil that operates against the capitalist conception of free labour. For Hardt and Negri then, this is “the point of maximum ideological contradiction with the republic of property…either freedom or property can be preserved, but not both.” (72) In posing slavery as a remnant of the premodern, modernity/capital can then propose that it offers modern solutions to this problem. Yet the issue of slavery is also a material one. Though Eurocentric histories see modernity as vanquishing slavery, in reality slavery was crucial to modernity’s development and a “massive segregation schema” (73) was enacted; freedom existed on one side of the Atlantic and was economically supported by slavery on the other. Racism then can be seen as one of the material supports for modernity. Attempts to foreclose or disavow the racist history of modern republicanism help to explain why the Haitian revolution has been systematically cast outside of historical accounts of “the Age of Revolution,” which are focussed on the “big three” republican revolutions. The Haitian revolution “reveals the profound contradiction between the ideology and substance of republicanism and modernity” (75) because, firstly, it freed slaves (thus violating modernity’s rule of property) and, secondly, it ended racial segregation (thus threatening modernity’s racial hierarchies).

Highlighting the relationship between slavery and modernity also helps us understand the power of slave resistance. Slaves are traditionally viewed abstractly as completely dominated subjects, though as Foucault noted, power and domination can only be enacted over subjects that resist. All subjects then, “have access to a margin of freedom, no matter how narrow that may be, which grounds their capacity to  resist.” (75) If slaves were in fact completely dominated then no power would be (nor need be) exercised over them. Thus, instead of conceiving of slavery as a vestige of the premodern to be vanquished by progressive forces of republicanism or capital, slaves themselves made their domination untenable as an economic system through their own capacity to resist. Citing DuBois, slaves set in motion an exodus, a “general strike” of sorts, that sabotaged the flow of  provisions to the Confederate Army during the Civil War. DuBois’s condensation of decades of slave revolt is meant to demonstrate the centrality of slaves in creating their own emancipation.  The point here is to see the resistances of antimodernity as existing within modernity itself. Contra Agamben then, Hardt and Negri assert that “humans cannot be reduced to ‘bare life’,” they remain “full of rage and power and hope.” (77) Thus, for Hardt &Negri, slave resistance is not antimodern because it rejects values of freedom and equality, but because it challenges the hierarchies that are central to modernity’s power relations.

The Coloniality of Biopower

In this section Hardt and Negri acknowledge and critique the function of ideology within the modernity-coloniality-racism complex. Forces of antimodernity are held in check both externally, through violence, control, and surveillance, and also through “internal mechanisms of subjectification.” (77) Heathens were converted to Christianity both by force and by re-education, within which the nature and capacities of natives were also redefined to meet the ideological motivations of the colonisers. Questions about native capacity for reason and their humanity are raised and “answered” in order to reinforce the hierarchy.  Here, capacity of native populations to be civilised is always seen as their capacity to receive such a salvation from the outside: the subjugated must first be ready to be saved. The limitation to critiquing the role of ideology, Hardt and Negri suggest, is that such critiques rest on ideology being somehow outside or separable from the subjugated and their interests. “Race thinking” is thus always posed as a failure of modernity and separate from modern society as a whole. Hardt and Negri propose a rethinking of racism not only in terms of ideological manifestations, but also in its material form. The powers of modernity-coloniality-racism are form of biopower that invests the subordinated with a productive power. Modernity’s power relations have never been just superstructural, but have material apparatuses that invest subjects. In this vein, “the Spanish Inquisition is an ideological structure, but it is also a highly developed bureaucracy” (80) To answer the question of whether or not, within biopower’s immense reach, there is possibility for resistance thus requires a reversal of perspective. Power is not primary and resistance a reaction to it, but rather, in line with Foucault’t assertion that power can only be exerted over “free subjects,” resistance is prior to power, it is “simply the effort to further, expand, and strengthen that freedom.” (81) Thus, the external standpoint that ideology critique seeks appears as “futile and disempowering.” (81)

2.2 Ambivalences of Modernity

Marxism and Modernity

This section begins with a critique of the notion of modernity as progress in various Marxist discourses that reinforce a teleological understanding of the move from pre-capitalist to capitalist modes of production similar to the social democratic notion of modernity as an unfinished project. This perspective sees the forces of antimodernity as backward and threatening. World-systems theories, they argue, have also inherited the Marxist ambivalence toward antimodernity and similarly reproduce its hierarchies. World markets are constituted through the gradual expansion of capital, though not absolutely linearly: there are cyclical contradictions and shifts in the dominance of particular geographic centres which in turn define new hierarchies and zones of exclusion. However, these systems take as given the “systemic nature of capitalist development.” (85) Antimodernity cannot be accounted for in these theories: because of their inability to recognise the role of class struggles in historical, social, and economic development; they cannot understand capital as a relation, nor can they account for the “resistances of subjects other than those directly involved in capitalist production.” (85) Yet there are other streams of Marxist thought that are better able to articulate the forces of antimodernity, though they remain, in Hardt and Negri’s estimation, still mixed with notions of modernity and progress. Lenin’s assessment that the battle between imperial powers in the First World War also created the conditions for breaking through ideological barriers that divided the world’s proletariat indicates a common struggle that breaks with progressivist discourses. Moreover, Mao’s elevation of the role of the peasantry in the struggle for liberation from capital represents an “antimodern theory of modernization.” (87) In later Marx he comes to see bourgeois private property as only one form that exists in parallel with many others. By focussing a model for communism in the Russian peasant communes, Marx’s thought moves away from notions of progress as there is no longer a requirement for the passage through capitalism on the road to communism. The importance of the common is only intimated here, but for Hardt and Negri is fully realised in the work of José Carlos Mariátegui. Mariátegui finds in Andean indigenous communities a solid basis in the common that can also serve as the basis for resistance within modern society. For Hardt and Negri, the combination of the above examples of Marxist revolutionary thought with “Inca communism” signals that antimodernity “should be understood first in the social expression of the common.” (89)

Socialist Development

The three great socialist revolutions—Russia, China, and Cuba—are each tied most intimately to notions of modernity and progress. They each reinforce notions of developmentalist political economies shared with the capitalist states that overshadow alternate political economic forms. Lenin’s attempts to reconcile his appreciation of antimodern antagonism with developmentalist economic strategies appear always as a deferral: the real problem here is that the “maturation process” of socialism never really ends. For Hardt and Negri this is an insufficient analysis of “the mystifying function of capitalist ideology and its notion of progress.” (91) As with other socialist states, the elements of antimodernity are eliminated while the hierarchies of modernity remain intact. Thus, the crises that enveloped Russian and Chinese socialism revealed the fundamental position of developmentalist ideology, both in Russia’s oversimplification of Marxism as a straightforward evolutionary move from the primitive, through capital, to the communist and in China’s refinement of a centralized political organisation of capitalist modes of production. Cuba has only managed to avert major damage by “freezing itself in time, becoming a kind of preserve of socialist ideology that has lost its original components.”[1] Similar developmentalist ideologies have been expressed throughout the “developing world” becoming a means by which forces of antimodernity could be repressed under notions of national development and, as class struggles were merely suppressed, resulted in a confusion of Left and Right political categories and a drive to the political centre. In fact, capitalism has managed to triumph, giving the brief socialist histories of Russia and China the distinct look of having been merely fuel for the development of capitalism. For example, socialism taught capital useful techniques, such as Keynesianism, which Hardt and Negri note is adopted by capitalist states in times of cyclical crisis. Yet, the three great socialist experiments did inspire anticapitalist and anti-imperialist movements, though such liberation struggles “can no longer be cast in terms of modernization and stages of development.” (94) Here Hardt and Negri recast Che Guevara’s turn away from his duties in post-revolutionary Cuba not as an abandonment of responsibility, but rather as a fidelity to core revolutionary principles of antimodernity that had been straitjacketed by the administration of a socialist state governed by a developmentalist ideology. Here there is a rejection of scientific socialism in favour of the power of movements from below to facilitate transformation.

Caliban Breaks Free of the Dialectic

Hardt and Negri invoke the concept of the monster in discourses of modernity as a means through which the forces of antimodernity were cast as non-enlightened, threatening, and savage, thus legitimising domination over them. Adorno and Horkheimer’s attempts to dialectically grasp the monsters of antimodernity, in which the immanence of antimodernity within modernity is acknowledged, are unable to find a way out of the barbarism that constantly frustrates the enlightened capacities of modernity. However, they are right to point out those non-liberatory aspects of antimodernity. But, in setting up modernity and antimodernity as a dialectic, they homogenize the forces of antimodernity as uniformly barbaric and threatening (the Nazis, or even popular culture) without recognizing that some types of antimodernity are liberating; this ultimately fixes antimodernities in solely oppositional roles. For Hardt and Negri, the monsters of antimodernity are not homogenous; far from bringing the dialectic to a standstill, certain antimodernities must be seen to be productive, exceeding domination and pointing toward alternatives. Breaking from Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic requires a reversal in perspective. This is achieved through reference to Caliban, the savage from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Reimaginings of Caliban’s role have focussed on his capacity for resistance, both through learning language from the Europeans and the possibility for him to free himself from his internalised subjugation. Finally, they offer the power of Spinoza’s imagination to exceed existing knowledge and thought and to facilitate transformation. Hardt and Negri suggest then that there are two positive tasks for analysing the forces of antimodernity:

1)      To distinguish between liberatory and reactionary versions of antimodernity.

2)      To acknowledge that resistance and freedom “exceed the relationship of domination” and cannot be “recuperated in any dialectic with modern power” (100)

2.3 Altermodernity

How Not to Get Stuck in Antimodernity

For Hardt and Negri, antimodernity is a useful starting place for theorising the common because it is firstly a resistance internal to modernity. Moreover, it is a “struggle for freedom within the power relation of modernity”; it is not geographically separated from modernity, each have always coexisted globally, and; it is prior to modernity. Since modernity’s power can only be enacted over already free subjects, there is no progression from antimodern to modern. However, there are limits to the concept of antimodernity because there is always the risk that it simply remains an oppositional stance. Hardt and Negri assert that it is necessary to move from resistance to alternatives, and thus propose the terminological shift from antimodernity to altermodernity. This shift is inspired by globalisation protests, which are interested in creating alternative versions of globalisation, in a sense taking the liberating elements of globalisation and jettisoning the disempowering ones. Altermodernity “marks conflict with modernity’s hierarchies as much does antimodernity but orients the forces of resistance more clearly toward an autonomous terrain.” (102) They propose that Frantz Fanon’s conception of  the evolution of “the colonised intellectual” provides a model for the shift, it passes through three stages: assimilation of European thought to become “more modern than the moderns”; a rebellion against Eurocentrism and a look back to one’s roots, an affirmation of identity that risks the creation of static position; a final creation of a new humanity, a revolutionary transformation. Discourses of indigeneity as a defense to colonialism are most interesting from this perspective. In former colonies (Canada, Australia, etc.) native resistance often begins with a rejection of stereotypes internalised from the colonisers, risking the static “authentic “position. Also, contemporary multiculturalism in former colonies requires that natives perform an “authentic identity,” deviation from which creates problems for the dominant culture. To move toward an altermodern conception requires acknowledgement of mixture, movement, and transformation in order to constantly renew native identities. This is seen most clearly in the Zapatista campaigns, which refuse fixed indigenous identity while also involving conflict with the Mexican state. Autonomy and self-determination are key features of this movement, which asserts the right to “become what we want” rather than simply “to be who we are.” (106) This ruptures the dialectic of modernity/antimodernity and creates the space for the constitution of alternatives. It also provides a model for distinguishing between a socialist and communist project. Socialism “straddles” modernity and antimodernity ambivalently, while, for Hardt and Negri, Communism ought to break with both and present an alternative path.

The Multitude in Coachamba

Here, Hardt and Negri develop a theory of parallelism. Altermodernity is equally concerned with culture and civilisation and labour and production. From the perspective of culture, labour movements are bound up with the developmentalist ideologies, while from the perspective of labour, culture and civilisation projects are primitive and antimodern. This conflict has threatened progressive movements throughout history, including peasant movements and gender struggles; among each, alliances were formed with either side. In altermodernity though, the various perspectives can been seen not in opposition but rather as moving forward in parallel. This parallelism is illustrated with reference to Bolivian struggles against privatisation of water and gas. As prices skyrocketed following a World Bank-advised privatisation, protests began. The key is that these protests were not merely centered around economics or culture/race/civilisation but were about each of these and more. Multiple subjectivities were engaged in the struggle, a diverse collection of ethnic identities from varied socio-economic levels.. The multiplicity of modern workers and working conditions means that a strict understanding of vertically organised classes is no longer functional, and instead needs to be replaced with a notion of the “multitude-form,” which emphasises multiple social singularities in while seeking to “coordinate their common actions and maintain their equality in horizontal organizational structures.” (110). The Bolivian experiences with gas and water are an example of this sort of horizontal integration and are also crucial in seeing altermodernity in terms of the common. First, because these protests were based around ensuring that common resources not be privatised and second because through their organisation the common appears as a social product. The protests that broke out were not spontaneous rebellion, but grew out of existing social networks and practices of self-government.[2]

Rupture and Constitution

The challenge of altermodernity is to both resist modernity’s hierarchies and also to craft alternative social relations based on the common. Thus, altermodernity shares much with, but is fundamentally different from, the perspectives of “hypermodernity,” which posits improving modernity but does not question the hierarchies intrinsic to it, and postmodernity, which, though it celebrates historical rupture, is largely a negative construction that finds it difficult to grasp resistance and move beyond modernity.

Altermodernity is a profound rupture. It is grounded in the struggles of antimodernity, but it also breaks with them by striving toward alternatives instead of stopping at resistance. Hardt and Negri propose three lines of investigation in order to construct a definition of altermodernity.

1)      An alternative line within European enlightenment that traces connections between Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Marx. This is the line that searches for absolute democracy and the desire to free humanity from domination but which has been submerged and made unrecognisable by the dominant transcendental formation of European enlightenment.

2)      The line of thought and action that derives from worker’s revolts and breaks from notions of modernisation and progress. This comes from Marx, Lenin, and Mao, who each struggle with moving away from Eurocentric developmentalist ideologies by focussing at times on powerful antimodern resistance.

3)      The traditions of antimodernity that, though they have often led to the reproduction of modernity’s colonial and racialised hierarchies, contain within them notions of the common as the basis for alternative social relations and forms of life.

Finally, Hardt and Negri suggest that the passage to altermodernity has some import for the role of the contemporary intellectual. First, the intellectual should be able to enact critique and propose alternatives. The intellectual must constantly push forward from rupture with the past. Second, there is no room for intellectual vanguards. Here, the intellectual is envisioned as a militant, neither on the sidelines nor out in front of the multitude, but rather a part of it, involved in a project of co-research and collaboration in order to constantly create the multitude.

[2] This calls to mind Robert Putnam’s work on “social capital,” in which he asserts that the loose bonds of pre-existing social networks (as opposed to the tighter bonds of intimate friendships) are often the most effective when mobilising community efforts.

I just finished reading Loic Wacquant’s new book Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. The book accompanies two other recent books by Wacquant (professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley) that explore similar themes: Urban Outcasts and Prisons of Poverty. Punishing the Poor is a detailed sociological analysis of the material and symbolic mechanisms and historical coordinates intertwining the simultaneous retreat of social welfarism and the advancement of new modes of social inequality, the precaritization of labor, and mass incarceration. While these trends have been shared in varying degrees across Western democratic states, Wacquant roots much of his analysis in the “penalization of poverty” in the United States, making the claim that U.S. post-welfare logics have provided the dominant frames guiding contemporary realignments of European governance and social policy restructuring.

There isn’t much here not already widely accepted by social scientists. Wacquant’s primary argument, echoing his mentor Pierre Bourdieu, is that “the downsizing of the social welfare sector of the state and concurrent upsizing of its penal arm are functionally linked, forming, as it were, two sides of the same coin of state restructuring in the nether regions of urban space in the age of ascending neoliberalism” (43). In other words, as the conjoined narratives and structural practices of deregulation and moral responsibility have produced new forms of social insecurity, cultural approbation, and punitive “workfarist” policies for low-income and racialized populations—i.e. those populations left most precarious in the hyper-mobile and flexible circuits of the global economy—the state has expanded its control, surveillance, and punishment functions. Wacquant thus describes the neoliberal state as a “centaur state, guided by a liberal head mounted on an authoritarian body, that applies the doctrine of “laissez-faire” upstream, when it comes to social inequalities and the mechanisms that generate them (the free play of capital, deregulation of labor law and deregulation of employment, retraction or removal of collective protections), but it turns out to be brutally paternalistic and punitive downstream, when it comes to coping with their consequences on a daily level” (43).

A central point in Wacquant’s analysis is that the rise in the penal arm of the neoliberal state serves a variety of key political functions in the government of social insecurity:

The renewed utility of the penal apparatus in the post-Keynesian era of insecure employment is threefold: (1) it works to bend the fractions of the working class recalcitrant to the discipline of the new fragmented service wage-labor by increasing the cost of strategies of exit into the informal economy of the street; (2) it neutralizes and warehouses its most disruptive elements, or those rendered wholly superfluous by the recomposition of the demand for labor; and (3) it reaffirms the authority of the state in daily life within the restrictive domain henceforth assigned to it. The canonization of “the right to security,” correlative to the dereliction of the “right to employment” in its old form (that is, full-time and with full benefits, for an indefinite period, and for a living wage enabling one to reproduce oneself socially and to project oneself into the future), and the increased interest in, and resources granted to the enforcement of order as just the right time to shore up the deficit of legitimacy suffered by political-decision makers, owing to the very fact that they have abjured the established missions of the state of the social and economic front” (7).

Like his other books, Punishing the Poor assembles an incredibly rich and rigorous collection of data to back up its major claims. Armed with a mountain of statistical evidence and acute attention to historical detail, the book pulls no punches as it surveys the intersection of social insecurity and punishment within the neoliberal state across the vectors of political economy and culture. For those interested in the politics of poverty and the law under neoliberalism the book is definitely worth checking out. In particular, Wacquant is very adept at approaching these issues from a variety of different theoretical standpoints while distilling his prose into clever, punchy, and insightful polemical figures. What I see as the fundamental weakness of Wacquant’s work is that it doesn’t delve deeply into questions of agency, resistance, and/or democratic alternatives to the neoliberal juggernaut. Perhaps no other contemporary sociologist has more advanced our understanding of the relations between the post-industrial prison and inner-city poverty, spatial stigmatization, and enclosure. However, Wacquant doesn’t give us much to work with in terms of thinking beyond these relations. Admittedly, in Urban Outcasts he does do an excellent job of dispelling the myths of the contemporary ghetto as a site of total dysfunction, highlighting how such narratives serve to reproduce in both popular and scholarly discourses racist stereotypes while missing the objective conditions of the highly complex social systems and norms that structure daily life in the most dispossessed and disenfranchised spaces of the urban. In my view, however, this doesn’t go far enough in thinking about alternative democratic movements.

While I think Wacquant could do more on this front, he nonetheless does conclude with a brief section on “how to escape the law and order state”. “To avoid getting locked into a penal escalation without end or exit, it is indispensable to renconnect the debate on crime with the paramount social question of the new century, which it now screens from view: the advent of desocialized wage labor, vector of social insecurity, and of increasing material, familial, educational, health, and even mental precariousness. For one can no longer order one’s perception of the social world and conceive of the future when the present is obstructed and turns into a struggle for day to day survival” (281). Wacquant proceeds to offer a series of brief suggestions for re-thinking the economic and cultural valences of insecurity and crime. Unfortunately, these recommendations including “defending the left arm of the state” (a valid and important task to be sure!) are not offered with nearly the depth or theoretical precision as the critique, and can be seen as offering not much more than social democratic reformism as opposed to a more forward looking project of fundamental transformation.

As the second decade of the twenty-first century begins, we find ourselves at one of those relatively rare moments in history when major power shifts become visible to all.  If the first decade of the century witnessed profound changes, the world of 2009 nonetheless looked at least somewhat like the world of 1999 in certain fundamental respects:  the United States remained the world’s paramount military power, the dollar remained the world’s dominant currency, and NATO remained its foremost military alliance, to name just three.

By the end of the second decade of this century, however, our world is likely to have a genuinely different look to it.  Momentous shifts in global power relations and a changing of the imperial guard, just now becoming apparent, will be far more pronounced by 2020 as new actors, new trends, new concerns, and new institutions dominate the global space.  Nonetheless, all of this is the norm of history, no matter how dramatic it may seem to us.

Less normal — and so the wild card of the second decade (and beyond) — is intervention by the planet itself.  Blowback, which we think of as a political phenomenon, will by 2020 have gained a natural component.  Nature is poised to strike back in unpredictable ways whose effects could be unnerving and possibly devastating.

What, then, will be the dominant characteristics of the second decade of the twenty-first century?  Prediction of this sort is, of course, inherently risky, but extrapolating from current trends, four key aspects of second-decade life can be discerned: the rise of China; the (relative) decline of the United States; the expanding role of the global South; and finally, possibly most dramatically, the increasing impact of a roiling environment and growing resource scarcity.

Let’s start with human history and then make our way into the unknown future history of the planet itself.

The Ascendant Dragon

That China has become a leading world power is no longer a matter of dispute.  That country’s new-found strength was on full display at the climate summit in Copenhagen in December where it became clear that no meaningful progress was possible on the issue of global warming without Beijing’s assent.  Its growing prominence was also evident in the way it responded to the Great Recession, as it poured [1] multi-billions of dollars into domestic recovery projects, thereby averting a significant slowdown in its economy.  It spent many tens of billions more on raw materials [2] and fresh investments in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, helping to ignite recovery in those regions, too.

If China is an economic giant today, it will be a powerhouse in 2020.  According to [3] the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), that country’s gross domestic product (GDP) will jump from an estimated $3.3 trillion in 2010 to $7.1 trillion in 2020 (in constant 2005 dollars), at which time its economy will exceed all others save that of the United States.  In fact, its GDP then should exceed those of all the nations in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East combined.  As the decade proceeds, China is expected to move steadily up the ladder of technological enhancement, producing ever more sophisticated products, including advanced green energy [4] and transportation systems that will prove essential to future post-carbon economies.  These gains, in turn, will give it increasing clout in international affairs.

China will undoubtedly also use its growing wealth and technological prowess to enhance its military power.  According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), China is already the world’s second largest military spender, although the $85 billion it invested in its armed forces in 2008 was a pale shadow of the $607 billion allocated by the United States.  In addition, its forces remain technologically unsophisticated and its weapons are no match for the most modern U.S., Japanese, and European equipment.  However, this gap will narrow significantly in the century’s second decade as China devotes more resources to military modernization.

The critical question is:  How will China use its added power to achieve its objectives?

Until now, China’s leaders have wielded its growing strength cautiously, avoiding behavior that would arouse fear or suspicion on the part of neighbors and economic partners.  It has instead employed the power of the purse and “soft power” [5] — vigorous diplomacy, development aid, and cultural ties — to cultivate friends and allies.  But will China continue to follow this “harmonious,” non-threatening approach as the risks of forcefully pursuing its national interests diminish?  This appears unlikely.

A more assertive China that showed what the Washington Post called “swagger” [6] was already evident in the final months of 2009 at the summit meetings between presidents Barack Obama and Hu Jintao in Beijing and Copenhagen.  In neither case did the Chinese side seek a “harmonious” outcome:  In Beijing, it restricted [7] Obama’s access to the media and refused to give any ground on Tibet or tougher sanctions on key energy-trading partner Iran; at a crucial moment in Copenhagen, it actually sent low-ranking officials [8] to negotiate with Obama — an unmistakable slight — and forced a compromise that absolved China of binding restraints on carbon emissions.

If these summits are any indication, Chinese leaders are prepared to play global hard-ball, insisting on compliance with their core demands and giving up little even on matters of secondary importance.  China will find itself ever more capable of acting this way because the economic fortunes of so many countries are now tied to its consumption and investment patterns — a pivotal global role once played by the United States — and because its size and location gives it a commanding position in the planet’s most dynamic region.  In addition, in the first decade of the twenty-first century Chinese leaders proved especially adept at nurturing ties with the leaders of large and small countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that will play an ever more important role in energy and other world affairs.

[9]To what ends will China wield its growing power?  For the top leadership in Beijing, three goals will undoubtedly be paramount: to ensure the continued political monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to sustain the fast-paced economic growth which justifies its dominance, and to restore the country’s historic greatness.  All three are, in fact, related:  The CCP will remain in power, senior leaders believe, only so long as it orchestrates continuing economic expansion and satisfies the nationalist aspirations of the public as well as the high command of the People’s Liberation Army.  Everything Beijing does, domestically and internationally, is geared to these objectives.  As the country grows stronger, it will use its enhanced powers to shape the global environment to its advantage just as the United States has done for so long.  In China’s case, this will mean a world wide-open to imports of Chinese goods and to investments that allow Chinese firms to devour global resources, while placing ever less reliance on the U.S. dollar as the medium of international exchange.

The question that remains unanswered:  Will China begin flexing its growing military muscle?  Certainly, Beijing will do so in at least an indirect manner.  By supplying arms and military advisers to its growing network of allies abroad, it will establish a military presence in ever more areas.  My suspicion is that China will continue to avoid the use of force in any situation that might lead to a confrontation with major Western powers, but may not hesitate to bring its military to bear in any clash of national wills involving neighboring countries.  Such a situation could arise, for example, in a maritime dispute over control [10] of the energy-rich South China Sea or in Central Asia, if one of the former Soviet republics became a haven for Uighur militants seeking to undermine Chinese control over Xinjiang Province.

The Eagle Comes in for a Landing

Just as the rise of China is now taken for granted, so, too, is the decline of the United States.  Much has been written about America’s inevitable loss of primacy as this country suffers the consequences of economic mismanagement and imperial overstretch.  This perspective was present [11] in Global Trends 2025 [12], a strategic assessment of the coming decades prepared for the incoming Obama administration by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central Intelligence Agency.  “Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor [in 2025],” the NIC predicted, “the United States’ relative strength — even in the military realm — will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained.”

Some unforeseen catastrophe aside, however, the U.S. is not likely to be poorer in 2020 or more backward technologically.  In fact, according to the most recent Department of Energy projections, America’s GDP in 2020 will be approximately $17.5 trillion (in 2005 dollars), nearly one-third greater than today.  Moreover, some of the initiatives already launched by President Obama to stimulate the development of advanced energy systems are likely to begin bearing fruit, possibly giving the United States an edge in certain green technologies.  And don’t forget, the U.S. will remain the globe’s preeminent military power, with China lagging well behind, and no other potential rival able to mobilize even Chinese-level resources to challenge U.S. military advantages.

What will change is America’s position relative to China and other nations — and so, of course, its ability to dominate the global economy and the world political agenda.  Again using DoE projections, we find that in 2005, America’s GDP of $12.4 trillion exceeded that of all the nations of Asia and South America combined, including Brazil, China, India, and Japan.  By 2020, the combined GDP of Asia and South America will be about 40% greater than that of the U.S., and growing at a much faster rate.   By then, the United States will be deeply indebted to more solvent foreign nations, especially China, for the funds needed to pay for continuing budget deficits occasioned by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon budget, the federal stimulus package, and the absorption of “toxic assets” from troubled banks and corporations.

Count on this, though:  in an increasingly competitive world economy in which U.S. firms enjoy ever diminishing advantages, the prospects for ordinary Americans will be distinctly dimmer.  Some sectors of the economy, and some parts of the country, will certainly continue to thrive, but others will surely suffer Detroit’s fate, becoming economically hollowed out and experiencing wholesale impoverishment.  For many — perhaps most — Americans, the world of 2020 may still provide a standard of living far superior to that enjoyed by a majority of the world; but the perks and advantages that most middle class folks once took for granted — college education, relatively accessible (and affordable) medical care, meals out, foreign travel — will prove significantly harder to come by.

Even America’s military advantage will be much eroded.  The colossal costs of the disastrous Iraq and Afghan wars will set limits on the nation’s ability to undertake significant military missions abroad.  Keep in mind that, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a significant proportion of the basic combat equipment of the Army and Marine Corps has been damaged or destroyed [13] in these wars, while the fighting units themselves have been badly battered [14] by multiple tours of duty.  Repairing this damage would require at least a decade of relative quiescence, which is nowhere in sight.

The growing constraints on American power were recently acknowledged by President Obama in an unusual setting:  his West Point address [15] announcing a troop surge in Afghanistan.  Far from constituting a triumphalist expression of American power and preeminence, like President Bush’s speeches on the Iraq War, his was an implicit admission of decline.  Alluding to the hubris of his predecessor, Obama noted, “We’ve failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy.  In the wake of the economic crisis, too many of our neighbors and friends are out of work and struggle to pay the bills…. Meanwhile, competition in the global economy has grown more fierce.  So we simply can’t afford to ignore the price of these wars.”

Many have chosen to interpret Obama’s Afghan surge decision as a typical twentieth-century-style expression of America’s readiness to intervene anywhere on the planet at a moment’s notice.  I view it as a transitional move meant to prevent the utter collapse of an ill-conceived military venture at a time when the United States is increasingly being forced to rely on non-military means of persuasion and the cooperation, however tempered, of allies.  President Obama said as much:   “We’ll have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power…. And we can’t count on military might alone.”  Increasingly, this will be the mantra of strategic planning that will govern the American eagle in decline.

The Rising South

The second decade of the century will also witness the growing importance of the global South:  the formerly-colonized, still-developing areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  Once playing a relatively marginal role in world affairs, they were considered open territory, there to be invaded, plundered, and dominated by the major powers of Europe, North America, and (for a time) Japan.  To some degree, the global South, a.k.a. the “Third World,” still plays a marginal role, but that is changing.

Once a member in good standing of the global South, China is now an economic superpower and India is well on its way to earning this status.  Second-tier states of the South, including Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, and Turkey, are on the rise economically, and even the smallest and least well-off nations of the South have begun to attract international attention as providers of crucial raw materials or as sites of intractable problems including endemic terrorism and crime syndicates.

To some degree, this is a product of numbers — growing populations and growing wealth.  In 2000, the population [16] of the global South stood at an estimated 4.9 billion people; by 2020, that number is expected to hit 6.4 billion.  Many of these new inhabitants of planet Earth will be poor and disenfranchised, but most will be workers (in either the formal or informal economy), many will participate in the political process in some way, and some will be entrepreneurs, labor leaders, teachers, criminals, or militants.  Whatever the case, they will make their presence felt.

The nations of the South will also play a growing economic role as sources of raw materials in an era of increasing scarcity and founts of entrepreneurial vitality.  By one estimate [3], the combined GDP of the global South (excluding China) will jump from $7.8 trillion in 2005 to $15.8 trillion in 2020, an increase of more than 100%.  In particular, many of the prime deposits of oil, natural gas, and the key minerals needed in the global North to keep the industrial system going are facing wholesale depletion after decades of hyper-intensive extraction, leaving only the deposits in the South to be exploited.

Take oil:  In 1990, 43% of world daily oil output [3] was supplied by members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (the major Persian Gulf producers plus Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Libya, Nigeria, and Venezuela), other African and Latin American producers, and the Caspian Sea countries; by 2020, their share will rise to 58%.  A similar shift in the center of gravity of world mineral production will take place, with unexpected countries like Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Niger (a major uranium supplier), and the Democratic Republic of Congo taking on potentially crucial roles.

Inevitably, the global South will also play a conspicuous role in a series of potentially devastating developments.  Combine persistent deep poverty, economic desperation, population growth, and intensifying climate degradation and you have a recipe for political unrest, insurgency, religious extremism, increased criminality, mass migrations, and the spread of disease.  The global North will seek to immunize itself from these disorders by building fences of every sort, but through sheer numbers alone, the inhabitants of the South will make their presence felt, one way or another.

The Planet Strikes Back

All of this might represent nothing more than the normal changing of the imperial guard on planet Earth, if that planet itself weren’t undergoing far more profound changes than any individual power or set of powers, no matter how strong.  The ever more intrusive realities of global warming, resource scarcity, and food insufficiency will, by the end of this century’s second decade, be undeniable and, if not by 2020, then in the decades to come, have the capacity to put normal military and economic power, no matter how impressive, in the shade.

“There is little doubt about the main trends,” Professor Ole Danbolt Mjøs, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said [17] in awarding the Peace Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore in December 2007:  ”More and more scientists have reached ever closer agreement concerning the increasingly dramatic consequences that will follow from global warming.”  Likewise, a growing body of energy experts has concluded [18] that the global production of conventional oil will soon reach a peak (if it hasn’t already) and decline, producing a worldwide energy shortage.  Meanwhile, fears of future food emergencies, prompted in part by global warming and high energy prices, are becoming more widespread.

All of this was apparent when world leaders met in Copenhagen and failed to establish an effective international regime for reducing the emission of climate-altering greenhouse gases (GHGs).  Even though they did agree to keep talking and comply with a non-binding, aspirational scheme to cut back on GHGs, observers believe that such efforts are unlikely to lead to meaningful progress in controlling global warming in the near future.  What few doubt is that the pace of climate change will accelerate destructively in the second decade of this century, that conventional (liquid) petroleum and other key resources will become scarcer and more difficult to extract, and that food supplies will diminish in many poor, environmentally vulnerable areas.

Scientists do not agree on the precise nature, timing, and geographical impact of climate-change effects, but they do generally agree that, as we move deeper into the century, we will be seeing an exponential increase in the density of the heat-trapping greenhouse-gas layer in the atmosphere as the consumption of fossil fuels grows and past smokestack emissions migrate to the outer atmosphere.  DoE data indicates, for example, that between 1990 and 2005, world carbon dioxide emissions grew by 32%, from 21.5 to 31.0 billion metric tons.  It can take as much as 50 years for GHGs to reach the greenhouse layer, which means that their effect will increase even if — as appears unlikely — the nations of the world soon begin to reduce their future emissions.

In other words, the early manifestations of global warming in the first decade of this century — intensifying hurricanes and typhoons, torrential rains followed by severe flooding in some areas and prolonged, even record-breaking droughts in others, melting ice-caps and glaciers, and rising sea levels — will all become more pronounced in the second.  As suggested by the IPCC in its 2007 report [19], uninhabitable dust bowls are likely to emerge in large areas of Central and Northeast Asia, Mexico and the American Southwest, and the Mediterranean basin.  Significant parts of Africa are likely to be devastated by rising temperatures and diminished rainfall.  More cities are likely to undergo the sort of flooding and destruction experienced by New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.   And blistering summers, as well as infrequent or negligible rainfall, will limit crop production in key food-producing regions.

Progress will be evident in the development of renewable energy systems, such as wind, solar, and biofuels.  Despite the vast sums now being devoted to their development, however, they will still provide only a relatively small share of world energy in 2020.  According to DoE projections [3], renewables will take care of only 10.5% of world energy needs in 2020, while oil and other petroleum liquids will still make up 32.6% of global supplies; coal, 27.1%; and natural gas, 23.8%.  In other words, greenhouse gas production will rage on — and, ironically, should it not, thanks to expected shortfalls in the supply of oil, that in itself will likely prove another kind of disaster, pushing up the prices of all energy sources and endangering economic stability.  Most industry experts, including those at the International Energy Agency [20] (IEA) in Paris, believe that it will be nearly impossible to continue increasing the output of conventional and unconventional petroleum (including tough to harvest Arctic oil, Canadian tar sands, and shale oil) without increasingly implausible fresh investments of trillions of dollars, much of which would have to go into war-torn, unstable areas like Iraq or corrupt, unreliable states like Russia.

In the latest hit movie Avatar, the lush, mineral-rich moon Pandora is under assault by human intruders seeking to extract a fabulously valuable mineral called “unobtainium.”  Opposing them are not only a humanoid race called the Na’vi, loosely modeled on Native Americans and Amazonian jungle dwellers, but also the semi-sentient flora and fauna of Pandora itself.   While our own planet may not possess such extraordinary capabilities, it is clear that the environmental damage caused by humans since the onset of the Industrial Revolution is producing a natural blowback effect which will become increasingly visible in the coming decade.

These, then, are the four trends most likely to dominate the second decade of this century.  Perhaps others will eventually prove more significant, or some set of catastrophic events will further alter the global landscape, but for now expect the dragon ascendant, the eagle descending, the South rising, and the planet possibly trumping all of trumping all of these.

Preface

In the opening pages of Commonwealth Hardt and Negri claim that the book represents an attempt to “articulate an ethical project, an ethics of democratic political action within and against Empire” (vii). Reiterating their position in Empire and Multitude, they argue that despite the insecurities, conflicts, and contradictions wrought by globalization there is no longer any space “outside” the new global capitalist order. For better or worse, globalization has created a common world. Because there is no longer an outside, creating more sustainable and democratic futures requires acting in this world through new collective projects of self-rule and political invention. CW thus represents Hardt and Negri’s attempt to fully articulate the conditions of possibility for a global democracy of the multitude. Central to CW is the conceptual deployment of the common. By the common Hardt and Nergi refer to the material world as well as to the results of social production—ideas, knowledge, images, and affects. While neoliberal forms of rule have led to the further enclosure of the commons through new strategies of capital accumulation and privatization, Hardt and Negri assert that globalization has also created common spaces and modes of knowledge particularly in the realm of digital communication and cultural production. According to Hardt and Negri, these articulations of the common—while still captured within empire’s distinct alignments of biopolitical production—represent an immanent potentiality for realizing an alternative democratic project: the “becoming-Prince of the multitude”.

Hardt and Negri distinguish their notion of the common from both private and public forms of control and reason. Their mobilization of the common is meant to bypass as well as to cross-cut through this distinction and thus also disarticulate a simplistic and ultimately false choice between capitalism and socialism.

Socialism and capitalism…even though they have at times been mingled together and at other times occasioned bitter conflicts, are both regimes of property that exclude the common. The political project of instituting the common, which we develop in this book, cuts diagonally across these false alternatives—neither private nor public, neither capitalist nor socialist—and opens a new space for politics (vix).

Hardt and Negri claim that this “new space for politics” is already nascently present within the circuits of contemporary economic and social production. Again this appeal to the potentiality of the “inside” so to speak is what really annoys those like Zizek who can only speak of an alternative politics in terms of negation and appeals to an as yet unrealized “outside”. For Hardt and Negri, as capitalism becomes ever more deterritorialized and reliant on abstract and immaterial forms of production, it requires the generation of common technological and social resources particularly in the abstract domain. Consequently, social life is animated through, invested by, and productive of various and unevenly shared common resources. Thus contemporary capitalism enables an ontology that is at least partially grounded in the common. It is this appeal to subjectivity—its generation and potentiality as a constituent power of the multitude—that frames the central terrain of political struggle in CW.

Hardt and Negri proceed by re-defining and mobilizing two additional concepts in CW: poverty and love. Poverty represents an attempt to grasp the changing dynamics of class composition particularly as globalization recasts relations of power within and between nations. Because of their precarious and marginal status to this order, the poor are obligated to generate alternative frames of the common—informal legal arrangements, modes of production, cultural communication, labor, and tactics of resistance and struggle—these frames represent possibilities for a new constituent power. The notion of love that Hardt and Negri develop is rooted in a re-casting of wealth as tending toward the becoming of desire and the liberating power of shared difference. Hardt and Negri state that these concepts of love and poverty require an intellectual force in order to put them in motion. They locate this force within the multitude itself: “the multitude is a set of singularities that poverty and love compose in the reproduction of the common…we will not pull out of our hats new transcendentals or new definitions of the will to power to impose on the multitude. The becoming-Prince of the multitude is a project that relies entirely on the immanence of decision making within the multitude” (viii).

1.1 The Republic of Property

In this chapter Hardt and Negri begin with a critique of academic discourses centered on the concepts of sovereignty and exceptionality. These points are also developed in more detail in the recent collection of conversations between Negri and Cesar Casarino entitled “It’s a Powerful Life”. The criticism of Agamben and conceptions of sovereignty derived largely from German juridical theorist Carl Schmitt has two sides. First, Hardt and Negri argue that the focus on sovereignty and the authoritarian face of exceptional power tends to obfuscate the utterly naturalized and quotidian structures of power and domination immanent to capitalist society. Through a historical analysis of bourgeoisie constitutionalism they argue that the law and, in effect, modern sovereignty have always been subsumed within a republic of property. Simply stated, the republic of property observes that within modern systems of juridical authority, capital and the law have always implied and inflected one another within a structure of private ownership. These intimate ties extend into the social terrain providing both the transcendent horizon of common sense and the frames of legitimacy behind sovereign force, authority, and power. This analysis is if anything refreshing, providing a necessary counterweight to those projects intent on proving Agamben’s maxim that the camp has become the “biopolitical nomos of modernity”. It also provides a point of departure for conceiving a theoretical basis for alternative politics.

This leads to the second element of their criticism. Hardt and Negri claim that the apocalyptic tone that accompanies Agamben’s singular focus on the negative tendency of biopolitics negates the possibility of conceiving an immanent constituent power. In order to move beyond this negative horizon, Hardt and Negri develop a minor form of Kantian critique. Here they delineate two Kants: (1) a major Kant intent on legitimating the transcendent structure of the republic of property (2) a minor Kant invoked most incisively by Foucault—a Kant for whom transcendental critique translates into a creative questioning of all structures immanent to thought and experience beyond the transcendental plain. They state that “whereas the major Kant provides the instruments to support and defend the republic of property even up to today, the minor Kant helps us see how to overthrow it and construct a democracy of the multitude” (21). This means not only “daring to know” but “knowing how to dare” (i.e. thinking and acting autonomously as a “mature” subject requires the necessity of refusing to obey. This minor tradition of Kantian critique has a distinct Deleuzian flavor. Hardt and Negri mobilize a Kant of invention and creativity meant to provide the intellectual scaffolding to imagine a form of subjectivity, and, in turn, a constituent politics beyond the republic of property. They end the chapter showing the major Kantian inflections of Habermas, Rawls, Giddens, and Beck in order to argue that the reformism advocated by these thinkers remains trapped within the republic of property and therefore cannot adequately provide the conceptual tools to move beyond the existing social order.

1.2 Productive Bodies

This is an awesome chapter. It begins with Marx’s critique of labor and private property as alienation: a form of abstract and material exploitation that is firmly etched within the legalistic transcendental order of the republic of property. They follow how these concepts were extended in the tradition of western Marxism, particularly by the Frankfurt School and Althusser to include a more detailed understanding of the effects of the regime of property on human life. For the Frankfurt theorists, this meant attending to the base/superstructure nexus and the dynamics inherent in the real subsumption of social life under capital, and for Althusser it entailed the development of a “scientific” Marxism concerned with deducing the ideological co-ordinates of capitalist reproduction. Hardt and Negri claim that these related theoretical projects represent a “phenomenologization” of critique: an effort to shift theoretical valences from the realm of the transcendental to the immanent and, in turn, to the micro-political fabric weaving together formal legal orders and the ordering of bodies. These points lead Hardt and Negri through a brief trip through the phenomenological tradition. Here Heidegger is the philosopher of negative being who like Agamben fails to provide insight into an affirmative power of life. They then provide a genealogical strand between Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault which recognizes the materially productive elements of being. It is with Foucault’s concept of biopolitics that they locate the most highly developed phenomenology of bodies. They simplify Foucault’s biopolitics through three principles: (1) bodies are the constitutive elements of the biopolitical fabric of being (2) where there is power bodies resist, in this way history is made through the resistance of bodies (3) resistance produces subjectivity in concert with other resistances. All these moves are performed in an effort to locate historical-political transformation at the corporeal level of lived existence—the biopolitical interstices of the multitude. Hardt and Negri claim “that only the standpoint of bodies and their power can challenge the discipline and control of the republic of property” (27).

In the last section of the chapter Hardt and Negri theorize the relation between the body and various fundamentalisms: religious, nationalism, white supremacism, and economism. In each case they argue that these fundamentalisms pose an understanding of the body which makes it disappear. Here the Spinozist influence manifests itself in full form as Hardt and Negri argue that while various fundamentalist truth regimes share a fetishistic concern with the body, particularly its containment, the body is nevertheless only recognized as a stand-in for certain transcendent structures that exist above and beyond the corporeal realm. For instance, racism in its modern variations poses a series of biological essences demarcating a transcendental hierarchy—a white supremacist teleology that stands outside bodies as such. Economism too is obsessed with the productivity of bodies, their capacities for entreprenuerializing risk and so forth. But it isn’t the productive capacity of bodies per se that marks economist fundamentalisms but the interest in the creation of surplus value that exists outside the actual materiality of bodies. In their effort to capture bodies within prescriptive orders, fundamentalisms attempt to deny the affirmative power of bodies to reach beyond given historical limitations. The interesting and important observation here is that the affirmation of bodies in their biopolitical potentiality poses not only a challenge to fundamentalisms, but insight into how various rigid, prescriptive, and ultimately misguided and often dangerous forms of thought might be transformed into alternative constituent forces. For instance, take the Tea Party/Sarah Palin wingnuts in the United States. While their “anger” at “big government” is rooted in a variety of irrational forms of reactionary thought, it would be a mistake to simply write off the movement as their grievances are rooted in very real concrete concerns—unemployment, proliferating insecurities etc. It becomes necessary not only to reject and fight against the transcendental appeals of this movement—vulgar economism, racism, nationalism, patriotism etc—but to develop a biopolitical practice where these grievances might be channeled into critical democratic agencies. Spinoza’s question - why is it that people willingly fight for their own slavery? - must be made subject to examination in all its paradoxical and ironic dimensions thus working to reconnect the dissonances and misinterpretations between cause and effect which muddy and debase contemporary political culture.

1.3 The Multitude of the Poor

This chapter marks an effort to further clarify the political conceptualization of the multitude. Again, the multitude is imagined here as an open and inclusive body that stands in opposition to the republic of property. Hardt and Negri claim that multitude resists the order of property due to their exclusion from it. This exclusion defined as the “poverty” of the multitude is what politically unites its open and disparate elements: its opposition to the republic of property defines the multitude as a radically inclusive composition of bodies. Poverty and exclusion are thus understood as constitutive elements of both the republic of property –providing a wage labor force etc—and the multitude itself which stands against it. “The poor, in other words, refers not to those who have nothing but to the wide multiplicity of all those who are inserted in to the mechanisms of social production regardless of social order of property” (40). It refers to political subjectivities that are radically plural and affirmative and, as such, pose a threat to the striated architecture of property wherever it has historically manifested itself. Hardt and Negri thus proceed by genealogically mapping the concept of the multitude. First, they track the concept in enlightenment political thought (namely Hobbes) where it appears primarily as a negative concept to be tamed through the principals of selective representation, such as through qualifications for political recognition and suffrage through landholder status in English law. Second, in opposition, they draw on Spinoza as the philosopher who most clearly articulates a relationship between poverty and the power of bodies as they strive to affirm possibilities for democratic community. Finally, Hardt and Negri again assert that contemporary conditions of global production have recomposed traditional notions of the working class absorbing all wage laborers and the poor within the dynamics of flexibility and precarity. “The poor, whether they receive wages or not, are located no longer at the historic origin or geographical borders of capitalist production but increasingly at its heart—and thus the multitude of the poor also emerges at the center of the project for revolutionary transformation” (55).

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