Amazon.com
Noam Chomsky is considered the father of modern linguistics. In this richly detailed criticism of American foreign policy, he seeks to redefine many of the terms commonly used in the ongoing American war on terrorism. Surveying U.S. actions in Cuba, Nicaragua, Turkey, the Far East and elsewhere over the past half a century along with the modern American war in Iraq, Chomsky indicates that America is just as much a terrorist state as any other government or rogue organization. George W. Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq drew worldwide criticism, in part because it seemed to present a new philosophy of pre-emptive war and an appearance of global empire building. But according to Chomsky, such has been the operating philosophy of American foreign policy for decades. Opponents of the Bush administration's tactics consistently point out how the American government supported Saddam Hussein for many years prior to the 1990 invasion of Kuwait (pictures of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand are easy to come by) as a means of pointing out how the United States is happy to fund despots when it's in American interests. But Chomsky, armed with extensive historical notation, takes this notion further, arguing how the repression of other nations' citizenry is, in fact, the very reason Americans support certain foreign leaders. The charges made throughout the book are severe, as are the dire consequences he posits if current trends are not reversed, and Chomsky is no more likely to make friends or gain supporters from the mainstream now than he's ever been. But Hegemony or Survival is relatively dispassionate. Instead of relying on camp or shock value or personal attacks as some of his contemporaries have done, Chomsky drives his well-supported points steadily forward in an earnest and highly readable style. --John Moe
Book Description
"Reading Chomsky today is sobering and instructive . . . He is a global phenomenon . . . perhaps the most widely read voice on foreign policy on the planet." The New York Times Book ReviewAn immediate national bestseller, Hegemony or Survival demonstrates how, for more than half a century the United States has been pursuing a grand imperial strategy with the aim of staking out the globe. Our leaders have shown themselves willing-as in the Cuban missile crisis-to follow the dream of dominance no matter how high the risks. World-renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky investigates how we came to this perilous moment and why our rulers are willing to jeopardize the future of our species.With the striking logic that is his trademark, Chomsky tracks the U.S. government's aggressive pursuit of "full spectrum dominance" and vividly lays out how the most recent manifestations of the politics of global control-from unilateralism to the dismantling of international agreements to state terrorism-cohere in a drive for hegemony that ultimately threatens our existence. Lucidly written, thoroughly documented, and featuring a new afterword by the author, Hegemony or Survival is a definitive statement from one of today's most influential thinkers.
Download Description
The United States is in the process of staking out not just the globe but the last unarmed spot in our neighborhood-the heavens-as a militarized sphere of influence. Our earth and its skies are, for the Bush administration, the final frontiers of imperial control. In Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky investigates how we came to this moment, what kind of peril we find ourselves in, and why our rulers are willing to jeopardize the future of our species.
Customer Reviews:
Connect the dots?.......2007-09-13
This material is not easy to digest in two ways. First, there are so many facts and figures that after a while your head begins to spin. I listened to it twice in succession just for that reason. Secondly, it's difficult to believe that your country's political leaders could possibly be saying one thing and doing another. Aren't we, the US, always the "good guys"? Don't we always do things the right way, "the American way"? Maybe that is a problem. Perhaps other nations want to do things their own way.
If you wonder why so much of the world dislikes or even hates the US, then this book will offer bountiful explanations, dating back to probably the Monroe Doctrine in the first part of the nineteenth century. Whether or not you agree with Mr. Chomsky's conclusions is up to you, but to refute him you will have a lot of offered facts to overcome.
Previous reviewers have labeled him a communist, or at the least, a communist sympathizer. I didn't get that impression. He just doesn't like American interventionist foreign policy which supposedly is leading to a New World Order, with the US the undisputed leader. And a lot of other people in the world think the same way and don't like it either.
If even a small portion of what he writes is true, it's a sad situation in my eyes. But if you consider the facts and connect the dots...where does it lead? Make up your own mind.
Dr. Chomsky.......2007-09-10
The most insightful look at the past 60 some odd years of american foreign policy, it's consequences and possible motives. A thouroughly researched and meticulously catalogued breakdown of the views and voices that have been there every step of the way, the voices that are usualy silenced and swallowed up by the historical accounts of the victors.
Chomsky poses the compelling question of our time.......2007-08-28
Other reviews have covered, at length, the perceived pros and cons of Chomsky's critique of American foreign policy in general and of the war in Iraq in particular, and I will reveal from the outset that my conclusions on these topics are simliar to Chomsky's in many respects. The incredible value of this book, however, is that seeks to address the question of human survival within the context of American foreign policy.
Although Chomsky does not delve deeply into the topic of the pending petroleum crisis, it, as well as other questions regarding the future of industrial civilization, is never too far beneath the surface. According to geologists of the Hubbard school, the world has reached or will soon reach a point of peak oil production after which the ability of global production to meet demand will inevitably decline, leading to a global crisis of unprecedented proportions. To the extent that U.S. policy continues along the lines of exerting hegemonic control over what is left as opposed to engaging in principled and collective effort towards creating a more equitable post-petroleum global economy, it certainly does lead us towards destruction or at the very least, a nightmarish Hobbesian existence in which human lives will indeed be "nasty, brutish and short".
One may choose to agree or disagree with many of Chomsky's arguments. However, for any thinking person who is conversant with history and who has an interest in social justice for all and not just for some, Chomsky drives home a number of points that are practically unassailable:
1. U.S. foreign policy, like the policies of great powers before it, have rarely been predicated on the publicly espoused principles of democracy, equality and freedom, but in the pursuit of its elite's interests, often to the detriment of the environment, democracy itself, and of the well-being of working and oppressed people around the world as well as within the United States. The unprecedented ability of modern man to destroy not only each other, but the very environment that makes sustainable existence on Earth possible however, dictates that unlike any empire or imperial age before it, the consequences of American policy are truly global in scope, and they may prove to be beyond any conceivable ability of repair.
2. The phenomenon of "globalizaton", in practice, has benefited, for the most part, only the financial elites and the military and technocratic elements whose services are necessary to maintain the system. For the rest of humanity, globalization has come to mean a nightmare of economic and cultural disruption and dislocation on a global scale. It is interesting to note that with the advent of globalization, the gap between the rich and poor has increased significantly, not only on a global scale but within the individual economies of the wealthiest nations as well. Lenin's "aristocracy of labor" is shrinking as we speak!
3. Despite the fact that the U.S. can justifiably be seen as the world's only military superpower, its attempts to exert unilateral control over the dwindling energy resources of the Middle East (and by extension of the rest of the world) will increasingly lead it into escalating conflict with other nations and peoples, resulting not only in its own moral, political and economic bankruptcy, but potentially in the destruction of civilization as we know it.
4. Only by understanding the nature of the current situation and organizing to change course can Americans and other people around the world prevent this continuing descent into madness.
Regardless of one's ideological inclination, "Hegemony or Survival" should provoke readers to serious thought on these matters, and for that Professor Chomsky should be thanked and applauded.
Another mandatory reading for those who wish to understand the world. .......2007-07-27
The writing has Chomsky's typical laser-like clarity. The facts are abundant and irrefutable. The arguments are powerful and inescapable. A refreshing break from all the propaganda and indoctrination that cover the landscape.
disturbing revelations.......2007-07-05
I hated how the book made me feel but it gets 5 stars for its brutal edification - as I'm sure was his intent.
Whatever your politics are, and regardless of whether you dislike or disbelieve Chomsky's conclusions, the facts laid out in this book speak disturbingly for themselves. Our government consistently pays lip service to supporting and promoting democracy but apparently has a nasty track record to the contrary. I would sincerely rather that not be true but there it is in the historical record. As stated by another reviewer, his facts are correct.
I could only read this book a little at a time. I would get too angry and have to set it aside for a few days until I could handle some more ugly truth.
I always thought Bush's statement that the terrorists "hate us because of our freedoms" did not quite ring true. In light of our government's actions reported in this book, the statement becomes absurdly transparent misinformation.
At least now we know the REAL reasons why they hate us.
SG
Average customer rating:
- Even The Little People Are Free
- The enunciatory present
- I'd rather stick my hand in a blender than read this again
- Mimicry, Mockery, Menace
- Even though this is one of the most highly regarded ...
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The Location of Culture (Routledge Classics)
Homi K. Bhabha
Manufacturer: Routledge
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ASIN: 0415336392 |
Book Description
Terry Eagleton once wrote in the Guardian, 'Few post-colonial writers can rival Homi Bhabha in his exhilarated sense of alternative possibilities'. In rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity, one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. A scholar who writes and teaches about South Asian literature and contemporary art with incredible virtuosity, he discusses writers as diverse as Morrison, Gordimer, and Conrad. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.
Customer Reviews:
Even The Little People Are Free .......2007-06-04
Bhabha writes dense, pretentious prose, which is commonplace now among the humanists who feel inferior to scientists, but he does have something to say. This little book does two things: it is in the end a celebration of literature (and not of theory for its own sake) and it defends the little brown people, such as Indians, against the claim of others, such as Edward Said, that whites oppressed them by denying them a voice. Bhabha argues in effect that the oppression created a new voice that subverted the oppressors. Bhabha has little patience for the sob-sister school of academic discourse which seeks out victims of racism. This is a sustained critique of liberal academic bad faith.
The enunciatory present.......2006-02-16
In The Location of Culture, Bhabha argues for a fundamental realignment of the methodology of cultural analysis away from ontology toward the "performative" and "enunciatory present" (p.178). Such a shift, he claims, provides a basis for the negotiation of cultural difference rather than its automatic repression or negation in the face of irreconcilable oppositions. Bhabha's emphasis on the enunciative production of meaning places the emphasis of critical inquiry on issues of representation or signification, thereby producing "a temporality that makes it possible to conceive of the articulation of antagonistic or contradictory elements" (p.25).
This argument represents a critical attack on the Western production of binary oppositions, traditionally defined in terms of centre and margin, civilised and savage, enlightened and ignorant. Bhabha questions the easy recourse to consolidated dualisms by repudiating fixed and authentic centres of truth, suggesting that cultures interact, transgress and transform each other in a much more complex manner than typical binary oppositions allow.
According to him, hybridity and linguistic multivocality have the potential to intervene and dislocate the process of domination through the re-interpretation and re-deployment of received discourse, thus re-focusing critical attention towards the "agonistic space" (181) which exists on the borders of difference, along the edges of alterity, where cultures meet. Bhabha celebrates cultural heterogeneity and the subversive effects of hybridisation.
I'd rather stick my hand in a blender than read this again.......2004-05-26
The fact that this book is influential is generally beyond argument. What astonishes me, however, is that so many people had the endurance to sit through the horrific writing; the author's style is obnoxious in the extreme. The first paragraph, for example, notes that the question of culture is the "trope of our times," characterized by "a tenebrous sense of survival." These concepts are not mind-bending. An everday, or as Homi would say, "colloquial" vocabularly would sufficiently articulate his thesis, yet he seems hellbent on packing his work with obscure language like he needs show off or prove something. Again, his ideas are influential, but he makes reading them as painful as possible.
Mimicry, Mockery, Menace.......2003-01-21
Ambivalence is a key term in Bhabha's Location of Culture. Accordingly, Bhabha's prose might be considered poetry or gibberish, but certainly not scholarship. There is no thesis, no argument, no evidence. That is not to say that Bhabha wouldn't be capable of such writing. Every once in a while, the reader can catch a glimpse of Bhabha's Other: the lucid thinker of post-colonialism. In order to compensate for the lack of clarity, structure and, yes, basic congruity between subjects, verbs and objects, Bhabha enacts the thoughts he fails to express. Indeed, his text is a performance of itself. Take, for instance, his chapter on mimicry. Whatever intelligent thoughts other scholars have derived from this concept, you will not find them in Bhabha's book. But he indeed shows you what he means, as he goes through the motions of scholarship. First, he makes a number of general statements that sound like a thesis. Then he puts a in a few convoluted sentence structures that make no sense-grammatically or otherwise. And finally he slams in a quote or two to prove a point-what point doesn't matter, for he did not make one in the first place. As a reader you will have to decide whether his work is a mimicry (in his definition "almost but not quite") of scholarship or its menace (according to Bhabha, 'not at all but still a little'). About one thing, though, he leaves no ambivalence: he "quite simply mocks its power to be a model." Harvard volunteered to be the evidence.
Even though this is one of the most highly regarded ..........2003-01-11
...theory books of the 1990s, its fame and reputation seem overblown. None of the other reviews posted here have really stated what Bhabha tries to accomplish in "The Location of Culture," so I'll give it a crack, even though I'm no expert on postcolonial theory.
To save you all some time, many of Bhabha's key points are made in the first two pages of his book. For instance: "In-between spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood--singular or communal--that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society" (p. 1-2). Elsewhere, in-betweenness is easily the key concept in the book, as well as the notion of HYBRIDITY. The reason the modernist model of Colonialism is doomed to fail is not only because it needs the Other (the colonized) to validate its own supremacy (and to fulfill its desires), but also because it engages in what Bhabha refers to as "contra-modernity": modernity in "colonial conditions where its imposition is itself the denial of historical freedom, civic autonomy and the 'ethical' choice of refashioning" (p. 241). Bhabha finds that by examining the borderlines between Colonial power and Colonial oppression, a truer history of global populations can be obtained. In one of the finer passages in the book, Bhabha examines a scene from Salman Rushdie's controversial 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses" and descibes how the postcolonial body--shaped by an outside nationalist culture--is representative of the colonizer, yet the colonizers "can never let the national history look at itself narcissistically in the eye" (p. 168).
Now let me preface my explanation by saying this is what I THINK Bhabha is getting at. It's not that his prose is "confusing," as other reviewers have stated here--although it is exceedingly "academic" (and there is nothing wrong with that, in and of itself)--but it is mired in the theoryspeak of the West that Bhabha seems so insistent upon de-centralizing. Bhabha uses the theories of the European male elite with so much blind faith that it easily undermines much of what he is trying to accomplish. Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida are all over this book. These "founders of discourse" (as Foucault called Marx and Freud--and could posthumously call himself given his exhaltation in the academy after his death in 1984) represent an alternate (i.e. "left") critical practice, yet completely dominate Western discussions of theory in literary circles. Is not Bhabha, an Indian scholar, colonized by these minds?
Also, Bhabha's insistence upon in-betweenness at times really seems to undermine his (apparent) intentions. He seems, on the one hand, to claim that it is precisely through in-betweenness that the oppressors dominate the oppressed. Yet, it also seems that this in-betweenness gives the oppressed the opportunity to resist the oppressors. We seem to be back at step zero. Is anything really being said here?
He should have followed better the example of Frantz Fanon, who appears early and often as a primary source in "The Location of Culture." Fanon was surely no stranger to the Western tradition, but was able to write in a critical-poetical-personal style that was accessible to non-academics, a style that had real fire. Bhabha, with all his emphasis on the work of postcolonial theory--which, in his words, seeks to "revise those nationalist or 'nativist' pedagogies that set up the relation of Third World and First World in a binary structure of opposition" (p. 173)--continually relies on the concept of "doubling" (likely a Lacanian theory) as well as his notion of in-betweenness (or liminality, as he calls it) in such a manner that no distinct point of view really emerges. The theoryspeak seems to subsume any important observations he might be willing to make.
While this book has some wonderful moments in it, I would estimate that about 25 of the books 250 pages really says something. I'm worried that this book has been canonized because the mainly white scholars that run the Academy need their theories stated in a dense manner by an Indian man to give them validity. I know that kind of thinking is very conspiratorial, but it is only a concern. I've not read any other Bhabha, or other postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak or Arjun Appadurai, but I cannot recommend this an easy gateway into this material. I would recommend the writings of Fanon, though his writing precedes the moment of postcolonial theory by some three or four decades, as a better introduction.
Amazon.com
If the 20th century was the American century, the 21st century may be a time of reckoning for the United States. Chalmers Johnson, an authority on Japan and its economy, offers a troubling prognosis of what's to come. Blowback--the title refers to a CIA neologism describing the unintended consequences of American activity--is a call for the United States to rethink its position in the world. "The evidence is building up that in the decade following the end of the Cold War, the United States largely abandoned a reliance on diplomacy, economic aid, international law, and multilateral institutions in carrying out its foreign policies and resorted much of the time to bluster, military force, and financial manipulation," writes Johnson. "The world is not a safer place as a result." Individual chapters focus on Okinawa (where American servicemen were accused of raping a 12-year-old girl in "Asia's last colony"), the two Koreas, China, and Japan. The result is a liberal-leaning (and Asia-centric) call for the United States to disengage from many of its global commitments. Critics will call Johnson an isolationist, but friends (perhaps admirers of Patrick Buchanan's A Republic, Not an Empire) will say he simply speaks good sense. All will agree he is an earnest voice: "I believe our very hubris ensures our undoing." --John J. Miller
Book Description
The term 'blowback,' invented by the CIA, refers to the unintended results of American actions abroad. In this incisive and controversial book, Chalmers Johnson lays out in vivid detail the dangers faced by our overextended empire, which insists on projecting its military power to every corner of the earth and using American capital and markets to force global economic integration on its own terms. From a case of rape by U.S. servicemen in Okinawa to our role in Asia's financial crisis, from our early support for Saddam Hussein to our conduct in the Balkans, Johnson reveals the ways in which our misguided policies are planting the seeds of future disaster. In a new edition that addresses recent international events from September 11 to the war in Iraq, this now classic book remains as prescient and powerful as ever.
Customer Reviews:
Astonishingly good.......2007-10-10
I came across this book when I was looking for the recently published book by Profs. Mearsheimer and Walt on the Israeli lobby. I was familiar with Chalmers Johnson's name, but knew nothing about his work. I just read Blowback and am eager to read the other two in his trilogy. I have a generally good awareness of the idiocy of most American foreign policy simply from reading newspapers regularly and well-researched books occasionally on foreign policy or political science or history - as well as from spending some time outside the USA at various times and in various roles.
The disparity between how the USA as an entity and through the citizens (mostly soldiers) it sends abroad to perform official roles behaves outside the confines of its borders and how the average citizen goes about his/her daily life and therefore perceives his/her country is frighteningly wide. However, I was truly stunned at the well-written, clearly well-researched and even-handed account that Prof. Johnson gives of USA policy and USA actions in regard in particular to Asia. I do not doubt the accuracy of his analysis and reporting. In support of his recounting of the utter waste of citizens' tax dollars on most military and military-related activity (so-called intelligence-gathering, covert undermining of non-dictatorial governments and the like) I noted that the Bush Administration recently (summer 2007) had one of its flunkies start blathering about the fact that the USA maintains bases throughout the world, notably in Western European countries, Okinawa and Korea even though there are no "hostilities" there.
The inadvertent raising of a pertinent issue regarding the USA military presence (in less polite words, occupation) in those countries was quickly excised from the arguments for establishing a permanent military presence in Iraq. Good point. Why does the USA maintain a military presence in these countries? Mr. Johnson's book admirably traces the why and thereby makes clear the horrible impact our presence in these countries has had on many people in the world and in turn on innocents in the USA, such as those who died at the hands of Tim McVeigh and the suicide airline pilots. It is books like Mr. Johnson's that should be on the forefront of discussion among politicians, editorial-writers and any others who attempt to make or debate policy. As the inanities, nonsense and outright lies that have no basis whatsoever in fact emanating from the current roster of right-wing, know-nothing Republicans in Congress - abetted on occasion by poorly informed Democrats - attest, the current unending propaganda regarding events and conditions in the rest of the world, notably in Iraq and in the Middle East in general, is likely to continue to overwhelm outstanding analyses such as this. I wish it wouldn't. I hope that those with some curiosity about the wonders and diversity of the world - not to mention facts about how the USA and other countries behave in the world - will discover this book as I did.
Blowback? Nah---mainly just Blow........2007-08-23
Chalmers Johnson might very well have entitled this manifestly overrated little jeremiad of gloom, doom, and rice-paddy Manchurian manifest destiny "Everything I know about Geopolitics I learned from the Golden Rule".
That's "Blowback": do unto others, O Mighty Great Satan, as you would have them do unto you. Or as the learned geo-strategist and member of the Council on Foreign Relations grandmaster funk-flash rapper extra-ordinaire Jay-Z once put it (in verse, and to a funky hip-hop beat, which is *way* more than Johnson accomplishes in this nearly cranium-anesthetizing snoozer):
"now you shoot my my dog/
I'ma gonna kill yo' cat/
just the unwritten Laws/
in Rap."
Word. Basically, Johnson is saying that all those nasty, naughty, uber-meanie things the U.S. did (or might have done, deniability, baby, deniability) in the last century (and now, yes, tiresomely the first part of the 21st century) are gonna come back to haunt us. Payback's a bizzle, fo shizzle.
Or, to dip deeply into the cliche snuffbox, what goes around, comes around. Or better still, if you're up for Chinese---4th BC Chinese---: "if you sit by the River long enough, you will see the bodies of all your enemies float by."
There: in this review, you've gotten the gist of Johnson's 'argument', and you've saved yourself the misery of having "Blowback" inflicted on you. You should be grateful.
OK: so example---we helped supply, feed, & train the Mujahadeen to fight a nasty and ultimately successful insurgency against the Soviets. The Jihadis won, kicked the Soviets out, and replaced a doddering, backward, socially repressive & economically retarded 19th century system with a---get this---doddering, backward, socially repressive & economically retarded 7th century system.
Progress? Yes. Blowback? NO! Not Blowback, not that bit anyway. Blowback was what happened when the Taliban and their buddies (including our Bon Ami et Frere Amicable Osama bin "Gin & Juice" Laden) got tired of crushing homosexuals beneath stone walls, blowing up ancient Buddha statues, and strangling dogs. Those crazy Talibs! We got 9/11, the ultimate "blowback.". Or blowup. Or something like that.
Now, it's true that Chalmers Johnson's 'idea' has a nice, simple symmetry to it, in the same way the delightful childrens' potty book "Everything Poops" does: it's, well, true. And obvious.
But seen from a different angle (say, that of adulthood), it's a bit retarded. Or, let's be kind, simplistic. It says, if you, as an Empire, or Republic, or whatever you are---if you do something, something's going to happen. Man, go tell it to the Spartans! (or Newton). Actions have consequences. If you read "Blowback", for instance, the blowback might be that you hear your brain cells scream as they die.
Take the British, who for years now have done everything they can to pretend to be a stodgier, duller, more moldy version of Canada, & what has that gotten them? Flaming gate crashers at Glasgow airport and having their Royal Marines publicly humilated and dressed by Tehran's answer to Today's Man.
But like Paul Kennedy yammering, with yen besotted yuppies back in the early eighties, that the Land of the Rising Sun was about to make us all eat sushi and do Shinto devotionals before our morning calisthenics prior to ruling the World---well, Blowback is just not all that. It's too elementary, man: it's thermodynamical.
And in politics, in affairs of state, in war and manipulation & sabotage, in all of that, it's not even necessarily true. The point being: if you're brutal enough, there will be no blowback.
Think about that for a moment: you don't even have to consult antiquity for examples where if you're willing to play around in a little bit of blood and crack some skulls, there will be no real `blowback'. Russia has ruthlessly crushed & decimated Muslim movements in its former Asian provinces and puppet states, the latest being the pathetic instance of Chechnya. And for all that, I have yet to hear Russia denounced by any imams as even a moderate-sized Satan. Hell, Russia & Iran are great buddies, so long as the latter keeps those rent checks coming on the old Bushehr reactor.
China is another great example: for more than five decades, China has occupied Tibet and taken every step possible to destroy its society and culture. For all of that, wanna know China's "blowback" from this merciless, honestly fascist occupation? The 2008 Olympic Games, a few thousand pathetic "Free Tibet" bumper sticker affixed to the bumpers of liberals' Priuses, & Richard Gere.
To dragoon Orwell's delicious little phrase, if you stomp on a man's face long and hard enough---you know, until you hear bone snap & soft tissue turns to jelly and the eyeballs pop out---there ain't gona be enough to---well, blow back.
In summary: Chalmers gets a big fat F for his stupid "Blowback" and should wear a duncecap in public.
That said, I can find one example---right here, right now!---that supports Johnson's thesis. Are you ready?
Johnson writes his tired, pathetic, dull little ratturd of a book.
In return, I gut his book like a sick fish in a quick and deadly online review.
Now that's what I call blowback.
JSG
Enlightening.......2007-08-17
The book's idea is that US foreign policy, made to win the cold war, has consequences. For instance, in '53 when we installed the Shah of Iran to act as a puppet for the West (overthrowing the democratically elected Mosaddeq because of oil) he repressed the people until he was overthrown in Jan. 1979. We'd be crazy to believe that the people who overthrew Persia's most ruthless dictator not be anti-American (since we installed that dictator). To this day I see people asking why Iran's government dislikes the US - "Do they hate us for our freedoms?" Taking this idea of "unintended consequences," Johnson talks specifically about East Asia and its history during the Cold War and after. In particular, he mentions Indonesia, Korea, China, and Japan.
I found the book very enlightening. Since 9/11 the US news and media's idea of international news coverage has been Middle-Eastern news coverage (except for natural disasters around the world and other frivolous events). Also, I went to public-school - I didn't know anything about Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries (and I took all AP history classes). So, there was this vacuum of knowledge about East Asia I had, which this book filled quite nicely.
Also mentioned in the book, briefly, are neoclassical economics, WTO, IMF, World Bank, 1997 economic crisis, Hungarian revolution, and the '73 Chilean coup as well as some other US interventions in the Middle-East.
Very informative, but drawn out and wordy............2007-08-04
This book is very informative and the first and last chapters are worth paying for the entire thing just to read them. Not the most Pro-American book I've ever read, but will give you an interesting take on things. Very in depth and revealing. Certainly shows how our American Empire can throw our weight around when necessary - and when not. Not bad, but a bit too wordy for me. Still good though.
Pull Your Head Out or Die With It In The Sand.......2007-07-17
This book deserves five stars, but I can tell you it's nothing like listening to this man speak in person. As in "Blowback" he lays it all out on the table. Sadly he says, "We just may have gone pass the point of no return." Americans now know that authors like Chalmers Johnson, Norm Chomsky, Webster Griffin Tarpley and Paul Waldman are not just over-educated nay sayers. We know that we're in real trouble, we just don't know what to do about it. If 9/11 proved nothing else, it proved that aircraft carriers, F16's, and smart bombs are useless against terrorists and apathy.
Dr. Johnson summarizes the status quo: "We have a strong civil society that could, in theory, overcome the entrenched interests of the armed forces and the military-industrial complex. At this late date, however, it is difficult to imagine how Congress, much like the Roman senate in the last days of the republic, could be brought back to life and cleansed of its endemic corruption. Failing such a reform, Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits patiently for her meeting with us."
I am without the education to travel in the circles of the aforementioned authors, but I can in my own way address my fellow blue collar workers... The media has dubbed me one of America's most controversial writers. I think it's because I criticize my own party, the Republican Party, instead of the Democrats. This unorthodox approach of mine gives people the wrong idea about me. I don't hate predators. If there weren't hawks in this country, those in other countries would show up here. Do not misinterpret "Hawk" to mean I approve of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney and their Hermann Goering protégés in the Pentagon. Bush is a mouth and a pen; he's in a different league altogether than his vice president. Cheney is a vulgar, immoral, sadistic subhuman. Does that make me a Libertarian?
Book Description
Generally regarded as the definitive work on totalitarianism, this book is an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political movements. Arendt was one of the first to recognize that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were two sides of the same coin rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left. “With the Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt emerges as the most original and profound-therefore the most valuable-political theoretician of our times” (New Leader). Index.
Customer Reviews:
Got Time?.......2007-03-08
There's no question Arendt is brilliant and inspired, but I should read the Arendt for Dummies or choose a shorter book. I began to read this volume, which covers Origins of Antisemetisim and Origins of Imperialism also, and got bogged down, so I began skimming. Definitely important stuff in there, and I did glean information that was new to me, but in the end I shelved the book because it is too long. Choose it if you are "studying", not just an inquiring person.
More relevant than ever.......2006-12-24
Though this book was written in the 1950s, there is much in it that is relevant to politics as we know it today. In the wake of the disinformation we now know to be the basis for the debacle of the current war, some of the statements made by Arendt regarding totalitarian regimes sound a very loud warning bell. A case in point:
"Totalitarian politics....use and abuse their own ideologies and political elements until the basis of factual reality, from which the ideologies derived their strength...have all but disappeared."
There is a disturbing similarity between the refusal of some of our government officials to admit their mistakes and the description of some of the methods used by totalitarian leaders to manipulate facts and discernible reality in order to produce outcomes they have previously predicted. Totalitarian leaders never admit to error. If the reader finds no other relevance in this book but that, it will have been time well spent.
A Book to be read now.......2006-08-08
I'll keep this simple: look at what is going on in the US, in the MId-East, in China. If that doesn't alarm you, you need to read this book even more carefully than the rest of us, as Histaory is about to repeat itself because our xenophobia knows no limits. This is as critical today as it was when Arendt wrote it.
A real classic.......2006-03-24
This is a must read for anyone interested in understanding popular history, values, and structures of modern western society, and how they relate to modern political power in the twentieth and twenty-first century. It challenges many values that are often taken for granted in national and international power play and politics. The Origins of Totalitarianism will remains relevant to current events, and a warning to those who advocate change without taking into account the mistakes committed by our forbearer. This book explains in detail the dangers to liberal democracy that the scourge of racism has been and could be again. On a darker note it could also be used as blueprint by those who wish to abuse power. A true classic.
At first glance one could be drawn into making close parallels between modern Pan Islamist movements and the Pan European movements of the twentieth century, but the analysis would be far from complete. The Pan European movements where primarily tribal in nature, where as the Osama's Pan Islamist movement forms a superset without full integration of racial components. The dangers and the cold bureaucratic cauculas are similar, however Islam spans many races and cultures. Race therefore cannot form the primary glue required to hold it together. Also Islamist movements are not progressive, they are reactionary in nature. On the other hand close parallels can be drawn to the Pan Slavic movement with regards to Saddam's Iraqi nationalistic movement. Osama's concept of Pan Islam differs in many ways from Stalin's or Hitler's base, the primarily glue is religious ideology and fear, not race or nationalism. Furthermore his ideology is not anywhere close to being shared by the masses within Islamic countries, and as a result terrorism is a requirement from start, not so much against the west, but against moderate elements or differing sects within the countries where this movement thrives. This is not to say that they do not use terrorism in all of it's traditional roles. Euro style nationalism is counter productive to the Pan Islamist movement, and one of it's objectives is to break down nationalism. In short if one must make parallels, they can be made to the books third section and Osama's Islamist movement operations, but only very weak correlation to sections one and two.
This book is written in a way that requires the reader to work hard, but it is worth the effort.
A Frightening Warning about Mass Man and "Virtue" of Thoughtlessness.......2006-01-16
Haannah Arendt's THE ORIGINS OF TOTAITARIANISM(TOT)is both a thoughtful book and a frightening view of both the background of totalitarianism as well as the practical application of this political phenomena. The reader should realize this book requires time and careful thought to appreciate the book's importance.
The first section of the book deals with antisemitism which Miss Arendt argues was a cornerstone of later totalitarianism. She argues that the gradual development of mass culture and mass politics resulted in targeting and scapegoating any target minority such as Jews. She explains that antisemitism was a gradual political movement that exploded in the late 19th and especially in the 20th century. A different thesis could have been presented, but thus far this is the best one this reviewer has read.
Part two of the book explains how imperialism and racism merged especailly during the Age of Nationalism. Religious discord was replaced by sociological and political theories that not only extolled nation but also race and blood. This section deals with these two concepts both in Western Europe and Eastern Europe. One must remember that persecution of Jews was particulary lethal in Eastern Europe between World War I and World War II and espeically during The Second World War.
Part three of the book is the best section of THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM. If readers have difficutly with sections one and two of this book, they owe it to themselves to at least read section three.
Miss Arendt makes a frightening assessment that the liquidation (mass murder of people of race or class) was not so much personal vendetta as these mass murders were bureaucratic operations that were done as a matter of political policy and "normal" bureaucratic operations. She warns readers that totalitarian leaders changed enemies almost weekly. In other words, those who were innocent one time were "enemies of the state or people" later. In other words, totalitarian leaders never never exhausted their enemies' lists and kept the masses alert for supposed enemies regardless of the rapid changes in those designated for mass murder. One quote that should alert thoughtful readers is, "The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any." The serious implication is that totalitarian leaders suspect that thoughtlessness is a virtue which benefits the leaders of the mass political movements. The fact is that once innocent people were arrested, they were "non-persons" whose memories were altered and then forgotten.
This book is a serious warning to anyone who takes pride in individual liberties and appreciates individual achievement regardless of their religious convictions or ancestry. Miss Arendt is clear that totalitarian leaders do not recognize talent except as talented individuals may threaten their arrogant self importance.
Readers would do well to also read Orwell's 1984 and Hoffer's THE TRUE BELIEVER to have a better grasp of THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM. This reviewer highly recommends this book with the reservation that this book is not "light reading."
Book Description
The noted critic and a Palestinian now teaching at Columbia University,examines the way in which the West observes the Arabs.
Customer Reviews:
Orientalism by Edward Said.......2007-10-17
Orientalism is an easy to understand book by Edward Said, a must read for anyone interested in the current conflicts between East and West. How the creation of the "Orient" is a necessity to justify the West's aggression since the Middle Age's. His analysis is of the Near East, but is applicable to all non Western cultures.
The Old Stone Thrower Is At It Again.......2007-09-20
The old stone thrower is at it again, expounding his one-sided, biased view of history. Said made a career of being a highly-visible defender of the Palestinians; was even a member of the PLO executive council. Too bad he was silent about Yasir Arafat's theft of hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for the Palestinians. He would rather blame the Jews for the Palestinians misfortunes, which they were the SOLE author of. What hypocrisy!
Philology to Think Tanks - Then and Now.......2007-07-17
Orientalism simplistically might be classified as the application of specialized knowledge developed by Occidentals then used by Occidentals to the long term detriment or destruction of Oriental values and states. Said carries the reader from century old philological works to area studies conducted by think tank specialists in Washington. It is the story of East vs. West raging since the 7th century and may rage for centuries to come
It is not an easy journey to follow Said's details, but he offers insights to ponder regarding East-West relationships in these dangerous times. As an engineer trained in science and mathematics, I found Said's discussion of the schematic authority of written materials fascinating. It is easier to become lost in worlds founded mainly on opinions and prestige than on rigorous applications of first principles of science.
I would have preferred additional materials from the post WW11 era and less on the writers of the 19th century, but he is writing for an audience that will be hostile and he goes to pains to identify his sources and his reasoning over many pages. Very worthwhile read.
Serious reading for a serious time.......2007-03-27
I could not stop reading this book. It is difficult at times given that it's serious criticism and I thought I had given up criticism when I left academia behind, but for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of why the US is in Iraq, why there are so many autocratic regimes in the Middle East, why the West cannot find real solutions for the plague that is terrorism, and why there is terrorism in the first place...this books is a good place to start. Said lays the ground work of colonialism and its repercussions.
Wish it were on sparknotes.......2007-02-19
but it's not, and sometimes one has to grow up and read challenging but important criticism. A seminal book for all readers.
Book Description
Reveals a dark secret of the ideological environmental movement. The movement imposes the views of mostly wealthy, comfortable Americans and Europeans on mostly poor, desperate Africans, Asians and Latin Americans. It violates these people's most basic human rights, denying them economic opportunities, the chance for better lives, the right to rid their countries of diseases that were vanquished long ago in Europe and the United States.
Customer Reviews:
Eco-Imperialism Will Enrage You.......2007-04-05
Paul Driessen convincingly argues that eco-imperialism is responsible for the widespread hunger and deaths of millions. The world's poor truly pay the ultimate price tag for their nonsense. Malaria should be a minor problem. The disgraceful banning of DDT alone results in countless deaths. Eco-imperialists normally live extravagantly and it is very fair to describe them as hypocrites. One has every moral right to demand that they wear hair shirts and eat uncooked grass. There is one thing, however, that Driessen should have stressed. He overlooked the sad fact that most people are self centered and really don't care about Third World poverty. Driessen needs to remind them that the extremist also hurt them. We all pay a steep financial price tag. Our own lifestyles are negatively impacted.
The author even takes to task a number of large corporations who have jumped onto this bandwagon. They do so, if for no other reason, then to earn billions of dollars from their investments in so-called green technologies. This is why they often seem so willing to partner with those dedicated to destroying capitalism. Driessen points out that the environmental crazies have no problem with funding. The big bucks only go to causes such as global warming hysteria. Government bureaucracies and the larger non-profits have often been captured by left-wing ideologues. They dictate policy and punish those daring to oppose them. I strongly encourage you to read Eco-Imperialism. You might even want to purchase copies for your friends and relatives.
Greenpeace: The Eco-Barbarians at the Gates.......2007-02-25
Rabid environmentalists have blood on their hands.
Through their quasi-religious promotion of theoretical eco-catastrophes, they have forced a virulent agenda that has resulted in the deaths of millions of people in poor, developing nations. Forced to follow the unquestioned shibboleths of "sustainability" and "social responsibility", poor nations (notably in Africa) are prevented from developing infrastructure that the first world enjoys and indeed seems to take for granted - instead, inefficient power sources like wind and solar are promoted, food imports are regulated and even banned, and ultimately, people are prevented from rising out of poverty. Note: even in the developed world, solar and wind power account for less than 1% of the total energy produced. Access to cheap electricity and clean water are crucial steps in development. Without it, these developing nations will remain forever mired in this tragic cycle of poverty. Preventing access to coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric power - the very foundation of the first world's energy infrastructure - is pure hypocrisy.
What is most disturbing is that people (read: environmental organizations) with NO STAKE in these developing nations are actually dictating policy. We have no business telling people in other nations how they can develop, especially when our intervention only makes their lot in life worse. The banning of DDT, the prevention of imported GM crops, as well as the ridiculous obsession with wind and solar power, have only resulted in more disease, starvation, and death. Folks, this is misanthropy cloaked in the clever disguise of magnanimity. Is it any surprise, then, that Greenpeace's own founder abandoned the organization because it had become so politically shrill and unreasonable? Greenpeace's loss of perspective is exactly what happens when you have large groups of people with strong feelings but weak minds, and a very limited cultural and historical frame of reference. Their practice of GM crop slashing, vandalism, and other forms of hooliganism makes them fundamentally no different than barbarians.
My hope is that future environmentalists will have a more rational and humanistic approach to solving the world's problems. As it stands now, the environmentalist movement, for the most part, is fundamentally misanthropic. They are more concerned about the theoretical effects of global warming and other prefabricated bogeymen than the very real suffering that is occurring around them right now. Their ideology interferes with their analytical skills and ability to discern the likely consequences of their policies.
This is a very short but excellent book. If you are grounded in reality, many of the facts presented here may upset you deeply. I recommend it wholeheartedly, however, because it fully exposes the misguided and immoral nature of many of these eco-organizations.
"The environmental movement I helped found has lost its objectivity, morality, and humanity."
- Patrick Moore, Greenpeace founder
"Why do Europe's developed countries impose their environmental ethics on poor countries that are simply trying to pass through a stage they themselves went through?"
- James Shikwati, director of Kenya's Inter-Regional Economic Network
"Developing countries need to be free to make their own decisions about how to improve their people's lives."
- CS Prakash, professor, Tuskegee University
Dont believe the hype (of this book that is...).......2006-09-08
Firstly, i want to make clear that i have a degree in geography and am very familiar with the topics 'discussed' in this book. Paul Driessen is obviously well-educated and knows how to write, therefore it must be assumed that he has purposefully neglected the facts in order to contrive an argument that will appeal only to people with no prior knowledge of the topic...
For example,
He advocates the continued use of fossil fuels by declaring that there is no proof carbon emmisions are responsible for climate change. Regardless of climate change, the excessive air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels is indeed responsible for chronic respirotory illnesses worldwide (inc in the third world), and also catastrophic 'acid rain'...
This one example is indicative of basically every chapter in this book (this is why it was published by a small company and wasn't found in my university library). Without prior knowledge of the subject, one could easily be led astray.
As a geographer i found this book interesting. However, its profound inadequacies serve only to strengthen the integrity of the environmental movement.
I do fear though, that too many people have believed the rhetoric they have digested in this very short book with a catchy cover and title.
Mixes truth with falsehoods.......2006-07-17
Paul Driessen, the author of this book, is a PR specialist who works for two business lobbyist think tanks, Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. The purpose of organizations such as these is to spread right-wing and anti-environmentalist propaganda. As such, the message of this book should be taken with a grain of salt. One reviewer said that if DDT was used widely malaria would be wiped out. Well, the pesticide companies want you to believe that, but biologists have found out that mosquitoes quickly develop resistance to it, making that statement untrue.
Like most pro-business PR, it mixes scientific and economic facts with falsehood. The purpose is to make environmentalists who get in the way of their profits look like monsters, apparently this book has succeeded.
Useful account of environmental movement.......2004-11-23
The issue of global warming is scaremongering, a massive red herring to make workers take their eyes off the tasks facing us - stopping deindustrialisation, unemployment, the destruction of our services, the European Union's destruction of our nation Britain. Scare stories about global warming, melting ice caps and glaciers, intensifying storms and droughts, a `Day After Tomorrow'-style ice age, overpopulation, mass extinctions, imminent famines, nuclear proliferation and energy shortages are grounded not in reason but in false science and a fear of progress. They are kin to medieval fears of apocalypse. We need to denounce the doom-mongers who portray us as helpless victims, at the mercy of events beyond our control as a nation.
The facts are that Antarctica has been cooling and its glaciers thickening for the past 30 years. Global fertility rates are falling dramatically, and with advanced technology, farmers are producing more food using fewer resources than ever before. Environmental pollution accounts for at most 2% of all cancer cases versus 30% caused by tobacco use. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world's forests covered 40.24 million square kilometres in 1950, and 43.04 million in 1994. 80% of the world's original rainforest is still intact. Sea levels in the region of the Pacific around the island nation of Tuvalu have been falling.
Some see all problems as supranational, requiring supranational solutions, worldwide action through intrusive international agreements like Kyoto, with cartoon cries to `save the world' through pre-emptive actions. They revive the anarchist slogan `No states, no borders' mirroring the capitalist agenda of `globalisation'.
Human innovation is the ultimate resource. Workers are wonderfully creative. The Greens, with their contempt for productive forces, line up with the anti-industry parson Malthus against the pro-industry Marx. The working class cannot conduct its present policy on the basis of scares about a possible future ice age in 50,000 years.
Amazon.com
Empire is a sweeping book with a big-picture vision. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that while classical imperialism has largely disappeared, a new empire is emerging in a diffuse blend of technology, economics, and globalization. The book brings together unlikely bedfellows: Hardt, associate professor in Duke University's literature program, and Negri, among other things a writer and inmate at Rebibbia Prison in Rome. Empire aspires to the same scale of grand political philosophy as Locke or Marx or Fukuyama, but whether Hardt and Negri accomplish this daunting task is debatable. It is, however, an exciting book that is especially timely following the emergence of terrorism as a geopolitical force.
Hardt and Negri maintain that empire--traditionally understood as military or capitalist might--has embarked upon a new stage of historical development and is now better understood as a complex web of sociopolitical forces. They argue, with a neo-Marxist bent, that "the multitude" will transcend and defeat the new empire on its own terms. The authors address everything from the works of Deleuze to Jefferson's constitutional democracy to the Chiapas revolution in a far-ranging analysis of our contemporary situation. Unfortunately, their penchant for references and academese sometimes renders the prose unwieldy. But if Hardt and Negri's vision of the world materializes, they will undoubtedly be remembered as prophetic. --Eric de Place
Book Description
Imperialism as we knew it may be no more, but Empire is alive and well. It is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri demonstrate in this bold work, the new political order of globalization. It is easy to recognize the contemporary economic, cultural, and legal transformations taking place across the globe but difficult to understand them. Hardt and Negri contend that they should be seen in line with our historical understanding of Empire as a universal order that accepts no boundaries or limits. Their book shows how this emerging Empire is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European dominance and capitalist expansion in previous eras. Rather, today's Empire draws on elements of U.S. constitutionalism, with its tradition of hybrid identities and expanding frontiers.
Empire identifies a radical shift in concepts that form the philosophical basis of modern politics, concepts such as sovereignty, nation, and people. Hardt and Negri link this philosophical transformation to cultural and economic changes in postmodern society--to new forms of racism, new conceptions of identity and difference, new networks of communication and control, and new paths of migration. They also show how the power of transnational corporations and the increasing predominance of postindustrial forms of labor and production help to define the new imperial global order.
More than analysis, Empire is also an unabashedly utopian work of political philosophy, a new Communist Manifesto. Looking beyond the regimes of exploitation and control that characterize today's world order, it seeks an alternative political paradigm--the basis for a truly democratic global society.
Customer Reviews:
Absolutely Epic.......2007-08-27
General Summary
In Empire political theorists Hardt and Negri describe a new form of global sovereignty called Empire. Unlike the modernist era which privileged the nation-state as the primary site of social organization and command, Empire is distinctly postmodern and ascribes to no central source of power. In replace of central power, rallied around the nation-state, sovereignty has evolved into a diffuse network of decentered nodal points. These nodal points include multinational corporations, nation-states, NGOs, and supranational institutions, all of which simultaneously vie for political and capitalistic hegemony. Empire's evolving political logic, while frightening to the extent that it attempts to reproduce global hierarchy, is, according to Hardt and Negri, a response to a crisis in capitalism that emerged sometime after 1968. While Empire is indicative of a new global order, then, Hardt and Negri view it as "better than the forms of society and modes of production that came before it" (43). Whereas previous historical epochs relied on repressive measures such as the Fordist assembly line to regulate subjectivity and discipline behavior, Empire's modes of subjectification are increasingly decentered and fragmented. This weakness in empire- a shift corresponding with the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism- is ultimately what can allow for the multitude, the locus of all production in late capitalist society, to "enter the terrain of Empire and confront their homogenizing and heterogenizing flows in all their complexity" (46). Hardt and Negri's work, as a result, reads as the "Communist Manifesto" of the 21st century; it takes Marx and Engel's theory of historical materialism and situates it in the radically different contours of late capitalist society.
Key concepts
Disciplinary societies
Hardt and Negri argue that the modernist era was characterized by a typology of social reproduction called disciplinary societies. In disciplinary societies "social command is constructed through a diffuse network of dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and productive practices" (p. 23). In disciplinary societies, then, power is consolidated in particular material localities such as the factory line, the prison, the school, and the psychiatric ward. This structuralist epistemology-- which views a transcendent outside as subjectifying an immanent inside-- corresponds with the model of ideology theorized by Marx and Engels.
In Marxist theory the bourgeois is believed to be coeval with the interests of capitalism. As a result, it uses this mode of production to discipline and reproduce the immanent productive forces of the proletariat. In late capitalism, however, as Hardt and Negri argue, immanence is no longer limited to the category of the proletariat. In the era Empire, a multiplicity of subject positions have all become immanent to capitalism, a consequence that derives from the emergence of immaterial labor and the global division of labor. This new terrain of immanence, then, requires a new conceptual framework, and for this Hardt and Negri turn to the concepts of control societies and biopolitical production.
Control societies
Societies of control are peculiar to postmodernity and coincide with the transition from capital's formal subsumption of labor to its real subsumption of labor. In this stage of capitalist production- a shift brought about by the multitude- "mechanisms of command become ever more `democratic,' ever more immanent to the social field" (23). In contrast to disciplinary societies, societies of control function immanently. They do not require any disciplinary practices (such as Fordism and Taylorism) to reproduce and expropriate productive social relationships. With the emergence of immaterial labor, life itself has become open to capital's command. As a result, capital can extract surplus value without even intervening politically or ideologically. This decentered form of govermentality, that characterizes societies of control, is ultimately empire's weakness, since its axes of repression are simultaneously its axes of transgression.
Biopolitical production
Biopower is a concept that originates with Michel Foucault and is used to describe "a form of power that regulates social life from its interior" (23). Foucault developed the concept of biopower as an alternative to the Marxian concept of ideology. Whereas ideology theory is interested in the way mystification takes place at the level of discourse, biopower is concerned with the way discourses and bodies are brought into being simultaneously as a "structure of feeling." The result is that biopower challenges the dual ontology between materiality and discourse, it demonstrates that discourses not only reproduce particular types consciousness (such as the bourgeois ideology) but also produce the corporeal, somatic, and affective properties of individual subjectivity.
As a mode of subjectification, biopolitical production could only develop in the modernist era; it could only exist in a time when the life sciences and research on eugenics were accorded fundamental values. Nevertheless, it is only in societies of control (or, in other words, postmodernity) that biopower has become the sole motor of social reproduction. While modernity used biopower as a tool for regulating the subjectivity of particular populations, in postmodernity biopower has subsumed the social bios as a whole. To this end, control societies and biopower (also know as biopolitical production) are one and the same: both autonomously propel the production and reproduction of global capitalist society.
Immanence
Immanence corresponds with the ideas of control societies and biopolitical production insofar as it views social organization as produced and reproduced prior to any model of human subjectification (e.g., Marx's base/superstructure, Freud's conscious/unconscious, etc.). At the same time, however, immanence is a transcendent concept; it is the Real (in the Lacanian sense) ontological state of being that exists prior to any dualistic human mediation. As a philosophical standpoint immanence reaches its zenith in the work of Baruch Spinoza who argued in the mid 17th century that man, nature, and god were one and the same to the extent that all move evanescently along the same plane of existence. Because of this belief in the immanent power of humanity, Hardt and Negri argue that Spinoza was the first genuine philosopher of modernist thought.
Spinoza's locating of the plane of immanence, nevertheless, was quickly undermined by a second set of (enlightenment) modernist thinkers such as Descartes, Hobbes, Hegel, and Marx. In their belief in the power of man to triumph over nature, all of these thinkers posed "a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire" (74). It is not until Nietzsche, Bergson, and later Deleuze that Spinoza's ontology of immanence became revitalized as a philosophical vantage point. In fact, it is Deleuze (the thinker which Hardt and Negri are most indebted to) who takes this heretical assemblage of thinkers to their logical conclusion, by developing a whole vocabulary of philosophical concepts centered on the Spinozian ideal of immanence. From an immanentist perspective, then, society always moves forward in a perpetual process of becoming. Its discourses, institutions, and technological processes are lines of flight that propel humanity forward. To this end, an immanent ontology is absolutely materialist (though not dialectical); it views history as the ultimate arbiter of human subjectivity.
Postmodernization
Hardt and Negri- echoing the thought of social theorists such as David Harvey and Fredric Jameson- "see postmodernity as a new phase of capitalist accumulation and commodification that accompanies the contemporary realization of the world market" (154). Instead of viewing postmodernity as an abstract theoretical framework, or set of ideas, then, postmodernity describes a particular assemblage of historical periodizations that have resulted from a variety of crises (or antagonisms) taking place inside capitalism. The most fundamental of these historical periodizations, according to Hardt and Negri, is the transition from a Fordist to postFordist mode of production. In postFordism "all economic activity tends to come under the dominance of the informational economy and to be qualitatively transformed by it" (p. 288). Productive practices that in the time of Marx were limited to material labor (e.g., mining, agriculture, factory manufacturing) have become transformed, from the ground up, by new informational technologies.
This incorporeal transformation means that scholars must understand the new types of immaterial labor being performed in late capitalist society. The rise of immaterial labor, or "labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication" (p. 290), demonstrates that the type of industrial labor that took place during the times of the Fordist assembly line is no longer in a hegemonic position. Although in quantitative terms industrial production appears to be the primary form of capitalist accumulation (that is, the production of surplus value), such an approach "cannot grasp either the qualitative transformation in the progression from one paradigm to another or the hierarchy among the economic sectors" (p. 281). In other words, because in late capitalism all nation-states are linked in a machinic network of power, the modes of production in the most dominant economic regions have a tendency to influence, regulate, and eventually transform the labor practices occurring in subordinate regions. While immaterial production may not be primary in regions such as Africa and Southeast Asia, then, it is the diachronic tendency and not the synchronic state of things that is necessary when theorizing the political action of tomorrow.
By understanding immaterial labor as the new hegemonic type of productivity in late capitalist society, Hardt and Negri are able to develop a new theory of antagonism and new theory of value. Because immaterial labor relies on communicatory frameworks to maintain capitalist productivity, agency lies in the constitutive power of communication, a possibility that did not exist in previous eras of production. Nevertheless, to act "as if discovering new forms of productive forces---immaterial labor, massified intellectual labor, the labor of the general intellect ---[is] enough to grasp concretely the dynamic and creative relationship between material reproduction and social reproduction" would be seriously problematic (p. 29). "The productivity of bodies and the value of affect . . . are absolutely central" to immaterial labor (p. 30).
Multitude
Although the multitude does not get developed in Empire to the extent that it does is their follow up book Mutlitutde: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, this political/social form plays a key role in empire. The multitude is Hardt and Negri's attempt to develop a new theory of class subjectivity, one that corresponds with the variety of changes that have occurred in postmodern capitalism. While the multitude includes those struggling for economic parity, and in fact views such struggles as crucial to its democratic project, it refuses to limit its conception of labor to that of the industrial working class. The industrial working class, while perhaps hegemonic in the time Marx was writing, is no longer the primary productive force in late capitalist society. Instead, a multiplicity of subject positions (centered around affect and immaterial labor) have all become productive of capital. As a result, only the multitude, the inverse of the people, offers an appropriate metaphor for describing this new revolutionary vanguard. As "the lifeblood of Empire," the multitude are necessary for capital's reign and if they were "subtract themselves from the relationship, [Empire] . . . would simply collapse into a lifeless heap" (Hardt and Negri, 2004, p. 335). The conclusion is that prerequisites for communism are already available, it is simply "a matter of recognizing and engaging the imperial [Empire] initiatives and not allowing them continually to reestablish order; it is a matter of gathering together these experiences of resistance and wielding them in concert against the nerve centers of imperial command" (p. 399).
Two Critiques of Empire
Lacalu
Asks whether immanence can explain social struggle. Claims that without the political production of antagonisms revolution happens on autopilot.
Response: Hardt and Negri's project of immanence can be defended on the same grounds that traditional Marxists, such as Cloud, have defended their approach toward agency. In Marxist theory, as noted earlier, the proletariat is immanent to the production of capitalism. Their rebellion, while not guaranteed, is a necessary possibility due to their relationship (as opposed to identity) to an a priori mode of production. In the same sense, then, we can view the immanence of the multitude as a radical political possibility. The multitude's relationship to Empire, while not preordained by god, makes it the only class composition that has the potential to overthrow late capitalism (empire).
On another level, just as Marxism cannot say what communism looks like because it has yet to happen, Hardt and Negri cannot say what exactly the multitude's political triumph will be like, because it too is currently only a relational possibility in need of practical politics. Nevertheless, instead of focusing on the totalizing power capital and viewing all social movements that do not involve the working class as "fantasy bribes," Hardt and Negri are able to discover a Real project of social transformation that is commensurate with our current historical epoch. Moreover, since Hardt and Negri, like traditional Marxists, have recourse to some a priori social formation (albeit one of immanence) they are able to maintain a commensurability with postmodernity without falling into the relativistic pitfalls of thinker's such as Laclau, Derrida, and Lacan.
Cloud, Callinicos, Wood, Zizek:
Argue that Hardt and Negri's project is nothing more than "mystical claptrap." Charge Hardt and Negri with being apologists for late capitalism. Associate Hardt and Negri's project with the position taken up in Stephen Spielberg's "The Land Before Time."
Response: Cloud and other Marxists ignore the primary axiom of historical materialism, the need to always historicize. One of Negri's greatest contributions as a Marxist scholar, over the past 40 years, has been to demonstrate that there have been multiple antagonisms that have taken place inside capitalism (e.g., Keynesianism, the new deal, the Vietnam war, postFordism, etc.). To limit our understanding of antagonism to contradictions set up by Hegelian (dialectical) Marxism, keeps social transformation in "a permanent state of anxiety" and promotes "hierarchical state thinking" by discursively creating the illusion that one antagonism is superior to all others. Moreover, even if at one time mobilizing the working class was the best option, the hegemonic tendency of immaterial labor, forces scholars to conceptualize a new political vanguard. For this reason, Marxism must recognize that the binary between reform and revolution is untenable. Further, such thinkers must accept that while capitalism can indeed be overthrown the pathway toward this rupture is completely overdetermined. The following quote by Michael Hardt in an interview in Theory, Culture and Society summarizes this position succinctly:
Capital is fundamentally anti-democratic. Any project for democracy will have to confront the anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian element of capital production - keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. But not every democratic political project need immediately confront the capitalist order as such. Let me put it this way, I don't think we are faced today with an alternative between reform and revolution. It seems to me that that is what the question brings up - is revolution required? And I don't think we are in a historical situation where the alternative really makes sense. The pathways of revolution and reform today coincide in many ways. When I'm saying this I'm trying to avoid forms of political thinking that say, `Since our objective is revolution we don't want reforms that makes people's lives better.' This was a revolutionary logic that we've seen in the recent past and, I think, among some today - an anti-reformist position in the name of revolution. And I think it is also equally mistaken to ban any talk of revolutionary change because it is unrealistic and insist on only the most immediate and practical reformist discussion. I think that today the two necessarily go hand in hand. One can't, in fact, think about reform without having a revolutionary perspective and visa versa. I am of the view that one is forced, when thinking about global democracy, to take an anti-capitalist perspective and think about and imagine the possibilities of a post-capitalist society, but not that all political actions have to be taken with that immediate overthrow in mind.
Empire: Old or New?.......2007-04-26
It is hard to read through books like Empire and come up with a precise understanding of what the authors had in their minds while writing the book. Empire shares both ambiguity and self-contradiction embedded in most postmodern arguments. Hardt and Negri aim to provide a leftist interpretation of contemporary globalization and suggestions as to how to reduce its malevolent effects on the working class. Personally, I found their interpretations imprecise and their solutions naïve.
Hardt and Negri's basic hypothesis is that contemporary sovereignty is different from modern sovereignty and this different form of sovereignty, which they call "Empire", forms the essence of current global system and unites the whole world under a single logic of rule (p. xii). In Hardt and Negri's usage, the concept of Empire first and foremost posits a regime that "effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really that rules over the entire `civilized' world," (p. xiv). A distinctive feature of Empire is that nation-states are no longer the only or the most powerful actors in it: "the state has been defeated and corporations now rule the earth!" (p. 306). Thus, Hardt and Negri conclude that politics lost its autonomy (p. 307).
So far, Hardt and Negri's arguments sound familiar. Indeed, my problem is that they are too familiar. I expect from any definition not only to tell me what something is but also to lay down how it differs from other things. Hardt and Negri actually do that when they contrast modern sovereignty with the "postmodern" sovereignty of Empire. However, I still do not have any clue as to how Empire differs from a world-system. Is Hardt and Negri's Empire simply a world-system with a late starting point? World-system theorists have long argued that, at least for the last two centuries, the whole world has been under a single logic of rule -namely, capital accumulation- and that capital (or Hardt and Negri's "corporations") has been the driving force throughout. In the same vein, since the very beginning of modern eras politics has never been autonomous. Capitalism and the modern nation-states were not two separate historical inventions; rather, nation-states were "constructed in order to clothe, and enclose, the developing political economy of industrial capitalism." According to Wallerstein and his colleagues, it was the capitalist world-system that reigned and nation-states were subservient to it. Thus, from a world-system perspective, Empire is older than what Hardt and Negri thinks.
A striking incoherence in Empire is Hardt and Negri's play with postmodernism. Hardt and Negri first openly criticize postmodernism for producing ineffective critiques of modernity. Similar to David Harvey's position on postmodernism, they argue that postmodernity is a new phase of capitalist accumulation and commodification. Unlike in the modern era, contemporary capitalism thrives on difference and hybridity which are celebrated by postmodernists. Thus, Hardt and Negri argue that "postmodernity is indeed the logic by which global capital operates," (p. 151). However, throughout the book, Hardt and Negri adopt postmodern positions when they find it convenient. They are particularly postmodern in rejecting all binary oppositions of modernity.
I have doubts regarding the validity of Hardt and Negri's critiques of postmodernism. It seems to me that difference is celebrated by global capitalism in a selective fashion; more specifically, it is celebrated in capitalist marketing but not in capitalist production. I agree with Hardt and Negri who argue that "postmodern marketing" recognizes the difference of each commodity and each segment of the population (p. 152). However, this acceptance of diversity is still far from the ideal in production and working relations. In the first place, global division of labor in world production resembles more to a modern binary opposition than to a postmodern hybridity. We still have labor-intensive, agricultural, and primary-goods-producing countries on the one side; and capital-intensive, industrial, and high-tech-producing countries on the other. Secondly, labor relations are still not as hybrid as Hardt and Negri argue. According to Hardt and Negri, the labor philosophy of contemporary corporations is that "people of all different races, sexes, and sexual orientations should potentially be included in the corporation," (p.153). Yet this is not the case even in the United States which they view as the embodiment of Empire. The entire low-paying industry in the US is filled with minorities -immigrants or blacks- so much so that one can consider the "white manager vs. black/latino worker" situation in the US a new type of slavery. That is why I disagree with Hardt and Negri's assertion that there is no "outside" in Empire and that there is no more a dichotomy of Third World and First World (p. 144). Postmodern times not only maintain and perpetuate the modern Third World/First World dichotomy, but also create the same dichotomy within both Third and First Worlds with increasing mobility of labor and capital. Interestingly, and only to increase contradictions in their book, in one place of Empire Hardt and Negri argue that European capital does not really remake noncapitalist territories "after its own image" as Marx once argued. Rather, each segment of the noncapitalist environment is transformed differently, and all are integrated organically into the expanding body of capital. In other words, "the different segments of the outside are internalized not on a model of similitude but as different organs that function together in one coherent body," (p. 227). I cannot read these words in any other way than an attestation to the existence of different worlds.
Hardt and Negri's arguments on the postmodernity of contemporary capitalism afflict their eventual suggestions to redeem the sufferings of working class as well. Hardt and Negri suggest that the first element of a political program for the global multitude should be a political demand for "global citizenship" (p. 400). But this political demand is simply unrealistic given the dynamics of capitalist world economy. Uneven nature of capitalist development always requires some "others" to externalize the negative consequences of development. In other words, capitalism thrives on spatial differences. Therefore, demands for global equality are contrary to the working of capitalist system. If one day it happens, global citizenry will be the most revolutionary development in history since modern times.
Empire is also interesting in that it deviates from the orthodox leftist evaluation of globalization. Whereas the common leftist reaction to globalization has been to criticize it as well as to mourn for subsequent withering of nation-states, Hardt and Negri celebrate the coming of Empire. They claim that Empire is better in the same way that Marx insists that capitalism is better than the forms of society and modes of production that came before it. They argue that Empire "does away with the cruel regimes of modern power and also increases the potential for liberation," (p. 44). I do not share Hardt and Negri's optimistic evaluation of Empire, though. True, the Internet and other technological innovations created new opportunities for the liberation of multitude. But has the capitalist-working class relation also changed in a way that help liberate the multitude? My answer is in the negative. In the past, people were forced into slavery/cheap labor; in Empire, they are doing the same job with their own will. Thanks to global poverty, no sweatshop under Empire has a problem of employment. As a World Bank report stated in 1979, "the poor... cannot afford to be unemployed; they are obliged to accept underemployment." To me, this situation not only perpetuates current inequalities between the world's rich and poor but also legitimizes it. Thus, the liberation of multitude in Empire is more apparent than real.
Finally, an important point in Empire is Hardt and Negri's rejection of the Third-Worldism embedded in some leftist arguments, particularly in the dependista school. Dependency theorist has argued that the dependent position of the Third World countries in the global economic system was the primary cause of these countries' underdevelopment. They therefore suggested to these countries to break their ties with the global system in order to achieve any type of economic development. However, like Wallerstein, Hardt and Negri argue that the global economy provides subordinate economies opportunities to grow if not to escape their subordination. Therefore, any attempt at isolation or separation will mean "only a more brutal kind of domination by the global system," (p. 284). They therefore implicitly suggest that leftist theorists should be more concerned with how underdeveloped countries can achieve `development under dependence', rather than breaking their dependence. This was one of the few arguments in Empire that I embraced. As the former Brazilian President Cardoso once put, the primary threat for the underdeveloped countries today is not their exploitation by the developed world, but rather their becoming an "unexploitable" country for the developed world. Indeed, as Knox and Agnew observed, "the structural irrelevance of sub-Saharan Africa to the contemporary global economy is probably a much more threatening condition than the dependency of the colonial period,".
Exercise In Neo-Marxist Scholasticism Short on Relevance.......2005-10-09
"Empire", which is now going on five years, attempts in its atmospheric prose to elucidate a totalizing world view of the future of the global economy. What emerges is an optimistic, incurably Hegelian proposition that the current globalization of economics and society, despite its oppressive characteristics, are a necessary (and inevitable) stage of modern capitalist development which must exist in order to bring about the mobilization of the "multitude." Hardt and Negri's boundless faith in the eventual triumph of the "multitude" (i.e. proletariat) is definitively neo-Marxist and utopian. Hardt and Negri further view the struggle as cutting across culture, class, race, and nationality, and that it must be seen as as multi-disciplinary liberation.
Given today's bleak political environment dominated by a conservative, evangelical and thoroughly warlike United States, and a progressive dialogue principally limited to finding the faults of the power structure rather than offering any coherent alternative structures of political economy, I grasped "Empire's" cheery exposition of globalism as a necessary, if evil, transition to a utopian state like a drowning man to a raft.
The problem - or a problem - with "Empire" is that it is like the auntie's Christmas fruitcake, likely to sit on one's shelf, only partly eaten, glowering sullenly until finally stashed away. If I still taught political science, I would torture my students with this book, much as I was tortured with Althusser and Foucault, the bread and butter of 1960s academic Marxists. Marxism remains a very valuable tool of historical criticism, as evidenced by such present-day historians as Eric Hobsbawm and Howard Zinn. As a predictive tool of historical development, and as a societal endpoint, it requires tremendous and unqualified leaps of faith and adaptations which are hard to relate to reality. When pressed to explain what the "liberated multitude" would look like, it is anyone's guess. If this is the anti-globalist Bible, as one reviewer so expressively states, there better be a thick codex to go with it.
There are plenty of good observations in "Empire" of the development of globalism and the erosion of nation-state dichotomies, but this is not particularly revolutionary. In fact, what is surprising is Hardt and Negri's faithfulness to conventional Marxist conversations regarding the future of the "proletariat" and the "working class." Likewise, they fall into the trap of characterizing the national liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s as some sort of organic global challenge to capitalist economies, when in fact, wars such as Algeria, Angola and Vietnam were anti-colonial and distinctly nationalist. Given the chance, political autonomy ranked far higher to these emerging states than faithfulness to socialist equity. Indeed, unless one has lived as an academic hermit or (maybe this is a cheap shot at Negri) in a prison cell, capitalist corporatism is as triumphant as it has ever been.
"Empire's" analytical flaws are not hard to uncover. I had to wince at points where Negri points to the "Los Angeles uprising" (the spasm of a riot following the acquittal of Rodney King's police assaulters) as a historical event on a par with the liberation of South Africa, or opportunistically observing that rap music is the emerging voice of the liberated "multitude" (obviously Negri has not seen Spike Lee's "Bamboozled."). Unlike the late Edward Said who was unparalleled at interweaving culture and political economy with uncanny precision ("Orientalism", "The Culture of Imperialism"), Hardt and Negri mostly engage in trivialities.
The opacity of most of the prose in "Empire" is, unfortunately, endemic to European neo-Marxist theory after the 1970s. What appears on first reading as precise diction is actually quite imprecise, yielding any number of interpretations which can be shaped to fit evidentiary data or events (to the extent such data exists). Paragraphs typically start with a declarative statement introducing a "paradigm" but then we are told that the reality is "less clear", subject to "disarticulation" or complex "matrices." From page 319:
"In Empire, as indeed was also the case in modern and ancient regimes, the constitution itself is a site of struggle, but today the nature of that site and that struggle is by no means clear. The general outlines of today's imperial constitution can be conceived in the form of a rhizomatic and universal communication network in which relations are established to and from all its points or nodes. Such a network seems paradoxically to be at once completely open and completely closed to struggle and intervention." Say what? I thought asparagus was a rhizome. As good Marxist scholastics, Negri and Hardt are consummate name droppers, which frequent references propel the footnotes and the narrative, while reducing to tears the average reader whose Foucault is still in the boxes of books left over from grad school. The frequent references to authors such as Delenze and Habermas are of little value to readers who do not have their shelves crammed full of such works, let alone actually read them. Each such reference, of course, is a meaningful shorthand for a cascade of complex ideas which becomes immediately lost to the uninitiated.
In the final analysis, though, "Empire", while an entertaining utopian epic, is topically irrelevant. Since the end of the Cold War, the upward struggles of the "multitude" have been overshadowed by the epic battle for resource domination (oil) in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. After 2001, this struggle in turn has been exacerbated by the medievalist religious conflict between Wahabist Islam and Puritan America. In no way did (or could) Hardt and Negri foresee the grim, gray "forever war" now undertaken by the United States, perverting the wartime command economy created over a half-century ago by Roosevelt into a mechanism to channel untold revenue to a select circle of military-industrial corporations. This, not Negri's, is the real story of Empire.
A Neither Nor Book.......2004-07-29
If it were really serious postmo scholarship, it would be a bit more honest about its starting points and sources (namely, Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard). Certainly an edition edited for America should have more bibliographic information. On the other hand, this book should prove largely inaccessible to the bestselling audience who have bought it and tried to read it (Michael Moore this isn't). That's because they will lack the background in philosophy and the 'superstructuralist' approach to social theory. To conclude, at least I'm honest enough about the book and with myself: having waded the whole way t
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