[Nettime-bold] Libertarians for Empire (was: The best defence is to give nooffence)

[Brian Holmes <106271.223@compuserve.com>]

Declan McCullagh wrote:

"I'm not sure what you mean by "neoliberal" -- Cato is in fact
libertarian..."

Europeans call them "neo-liberals," which means laissez-faire capitalists,
Americans don't understand and say no, they're liberatarians, which to
Europeans sounds like anarchists! Could there be a reason for this ideology
mix?

The curious can find out in a review of "Empire" at
http://slash.autonomedia.org. The big question is: can you be an autonomist
against neoliberalism? Malcom Bull doesn't think so. It's a polemic,
overstated to make a point, but it would be interesting to see how a
hard-core autonomist refutes him. Since the article is way too long, I cut
out all the blah blah:


"You can't build a new society with a Stanley knife"
by Malcom Bull

...Since the end of the Cold War, Neoliberalism  has become so
ideologically dominant that it is no longer clear whether the real
Neoliberals are the leaders of the G8 or the people outside in the
balaclavas and the overalls. Take Ya Basta!... their two key political
demands, free migration and the right to a guaranteed basic income, are
policies that were once largely the preserve of Neoliberal think-tanks in
the United States... For Neoliberals one of the attractions of these
policies was their incompatibility with the welfare state. Basic income was
the cheap alternative to welfare... free migration, which would make a
nation's welfare benefits accessible to everyone in the world, would
quickly make the hard-won achievements of the welfare system
unsustainable...

Although it originated from a Marxist analysis of the class struggle, the
conception of autonomy autonomy which inspired the Autonomia movement in
Italy and the Autonomen of Germany and Northern Europe has come
substantially to overlap with the Neoliberal ideal of negative liberty. The
initial move looked revolutionary:  ... the class struggle could be waged
more effectively if the working class disengaged from waged labour and
sought autonomy for itself. ...autonomous action, independent of unions and
party, would sever the working class from capitalism, and without labour to
sustain it capitalism would collapse...

Negri's rediscovery of republican thought in the early 1980s paralleled
that of Quentin Skinner in Britain, and the retrieval of Anti-Federalism by
libertarians in the United States. In no case did this involve repudiation
of the idea of negative liberty, just a renewed emphasis on the point that
people can be free only if they also have an ongoing capacity for
self-government. For Skinner this meant a call to active citizenship, while
for Negri it involved a reaffirmation of the Anti-Federalist view that the
constituent power of the citizen is not irretrievably transferred to the
sovereign through some contract or constitution. The constituent power of
the multitude is inalienable; it remains, as Negri writes in Insurgencies,
'an irresistible provocation to imbalance, restlessness and historical
ruptures'...

Empire, like other forms of sovereignty (imperium in Spinoza), is only the
power of the people writ large. In globalisation, alternatives to
capitalism are not defeated so much as given new opportunity to work on a
global scale: 'The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are
also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative
political organisation of global flows and exchange.' ... By simultaneously
redefining globalisation as a form of sovereignty and recasting the
autonomist project in the republican tradition, Hardt and Negri offer an
exceptionally optimistic analysis of the problem: remote as it may seem,
sovereignty is nothing that a few like-minded people cannot create for
themselves... In reply to Machiavelli's observation that the project of
constructing a new society needs arms and money, [Negri and Hardt] cite
Spinoza and ask: 'Don't we already possess them? Don't the necessary
weapons reside precisely within the creative and prophetic power of the
multitude?' No one is powerless; even the old, the sick and the unemployed
are engaged in the 'immaterial labour' that produces 'total social
capital'. Sounding a bit like Ali G, they conclude: 'The poor itself is
power. There is World Poverty, but there is above all World Possibility,
and only the poor is capable of this.'

It is difficult to see how this analysis comprehends the reality of
powerlessness. You may be able to threaten the world with a Stanley knife,
but you cannot build a new society with one. Insofar as the problems of the
powerless have been addressed in recent years it is often through a dynamic
that works in the opposite direction to the one Hardt and Negri suggest.
Their response to globalisation is to maintain that since we have not
contracted into global society, we still have all the power we need to
change it. The alternative is to argue that a geographically boundless
society must also be a totally inclusive society. The latter is an
extension of what used to be called the politics of recognition.
Globalisation may have replaced multiculturalism as the focus of
contemporary political debate, but there is an underlying continuity: the
concern of anti-globalisation protesters with remote regions of the world,
with the lives of people unlike themselves, and with species of animals and
plants that most have seen only on TV is predicated on an unparalleled
imaginative identification with the Other. This totalisation of the
politics of recognition from the local to the global is what has given
momentum to campaigns such as the one for African Aids victims; here, it is
a question of sympathy rather than sovereignty, of justice rather than
power. In many cases, unless the powerful recognised some kinship with
them, the powerless would just die. Capitalism has no need for the
'immaterial labour' of millions now living. For powerless human beings, as
for other species, autonomy leads to extinction.

The conflict at the centre of the movement against global capitalism is the
tension between its libertarian stance and the demand for global justice.
Although Hardt and Negri are pro-globalisation and anti-capitalism they
belong firmly in the libertarian camp. The 'postmodern republicanism' they
advocate expresses the 'multitude's desire for liberation' through
'desertion, exodus and nomadism'.

For [Hannah] Arendt, it was the other sort of revolution, motivated by
compassion rather than the desire for freedom, that led inexorably to
terror and totalitarianism. She may not have been altogether wrong. All
those do-gooders are more dangerous than they look. Even the much-touted
idea of a tax on currency speculation (designed to reduce market volatility
and provide resources for sustainable development) would require worldwide
ideological consensus for its enactment. ... Effective environmental
regulation would restrict the movement, fertility and consumption patterns
of individuals all over the planet. The ideological alternative to
Neoliberalism is, as Neoliberals never tire of saying, some form of
totalitarianism.

But that can only be a reason for people to start thinking about what new
forms of totalitarianism might be possible, and, indeed,desirable. In the
United States, the discussion has been kick-started by the recent
hijackings. Globalisation appears to have created a world of unlimited
risk, without a corresponding totalisation of the means of social control.
... Hardt and Negri have no interest in the control of risk - a world of
unlimited risk is a world of unlimited constituent power - and they dismiss
the totalitarian understanding of society as one in which 'community is not
a dynamic collective creation but a primordial founding myth.' But the
debate about social control prompted by the hijackings is one that others
on the Left should hurry to join. ...without yet realising it, the world's
only superpower wants to achieve something that presupposes greater
economic and social justice. Current US policy may be unacceptable, but the
long-term project holds an unexpected promise.

If the 'war against terrorism' is going to be less of a fiasco than the
'war on drugs', it requires global social inclusivity and reciprocity.
Total social control involves a degree of microregulation with which
individuals have to co-operate. One way totalitarian societies have
differed from those that are merely authoritarian is in their provision of
work and healthcare. ... If the US wants to make the world a safer place,
it will eventually have to offer, or force other governments to provide,
the population of the entire world with the means to participate in global
society.

The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century got a bad name less because of
their monopolistic control of everyday life than on account of their
stifling insistence on a maxim of shared values, and their draconian
punishments for nonconformity. They were, in Durkheimian terms, attempts to
create total communities rather than total societies. The US offers a model
for a different type of totalitarianism. Within a total society - a world
of universal anomie populated by the hybridised subjects of mutual
recognition - monopolistic microregulation need not be concerned with
conformity. Of course, a global United States is not a total society, but
total society is rapidly becoming more imaginable than the state of nature
from which political theorising has traditionally started. In this
situation, we need to start thinking in new ways. Negri's version of what
Althusser called 'totality without closure' is a politics without a social
contract, 'a constituent power without limitations'. But in a total
society, it is not the social that needs a contract but the individual - an
anti-social contract that creates individual spaces in a world totally
regulated by meaningless mutuality.


Originally from:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n19/bull2319.htm


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