Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Multitude: An Antidote to Empire"

Francis Fukuyama, New York Times

Well before 9/11 and the Iraq war put the idea in everybody's mind,
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri had popularized the notion of a modern
empire. Four years ago, they argued in a widely discussed book —
titled, as it happens, Empire — that the globe was ruled by a new
imperial order, different from earlier ones, which were based on overt
military domination. This one had no center; it was managed by the
world's wealthy nation-states (particularly the United States), by
multinational corporations and by international institutions like the
World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. This
empire — a k a globalization — was exploitative, undemocratic and
repressive, not only for developing countries but also for the excluded
in the rich West.

Hardt and Negri's new book, Multitude, argues that the antidote to
empire is the realization of true democracy, ''the rule of everyone by
everyone, a democracy without qualifiers.'' They say that the left
needs to leave behind outdated concepts like the proletariat and the
working class, which vastly oversimplify the gender/racial/ethnic/
class diversities of today's world. In their place they propose the
term ''multitude,'' to capture the ''commonality and singularity'' of
those who stand in opposition to the wealthy and powerful.This book — which lurches from analyses of intellectual property
rules for genetically engineered animals to discourses on Dostoyevsky
and the myth of the golem — deals with an imaginary problem and a real
problem. Unfortunately, it provides us with an imaginary solution to
the real problem.

The imaginary problem stems from the authors' basic understanding of
economics and politics, which remains at its core unreconstructedly
Marxist. For them, there is no such thing as voluntary economic
exchange, only coercive political hierarchy: any unequal division of
rewards is prima facie evidence of exploitation. Private property is a
form of theft. Globalization has no redeeming benefits whatsoever.
(East Asia's rise from third- to first-world status in the last 50
years seems not to have registered on their mental map.) Similarly,
democracy is not embodied in constitutions, political parties or
elections, which are simply manipulated to benefit elites. The half of
the country that votes Republican is evidently not part of the book's
multitude.

To all this Hardt and Negri add an extremely confused theory, their
take on what Daniel Bell labeled postindustrial society, and what has
more recently been called the ''knowledge economy.'' The ''immaterial
labor'' of knowledge workers differs from labor in the industrial era,
Hardt and Negri say, because it produces not objects but social
relations. It is inherently communal, which implies that no one can
legitimately appropriate it for private gain. Programmers at Microsoft
may be surprised to discover that because they collaborate with one
another, their programs belong to everybody.

It's hard to know even how to engage this set of assertions.
Globalization is a complex phenomenon; it produces winners and losers
among rich and poor alike. But you would never learn about the
complexities from reading ''Multitude.'' So let's move on to Hardt and
Negri's real problem, which has to do with global governance.

We have at this point in human history evolved fairly good democratic
political institutions, but only at the level of the nation-state. With
globalization — and increased flows of information, goods, money and
people across borders — countries are now better able to help, but
also to harm, one another. In the 1990's, the harm was felt primarily
through financial shocks and job losses, and since 9/11 it has acquired
a military dimension as well. As the authors state, ''one result of the
current form of globalization is that certain national leaders, both
elected and unelected, gain greater powers over populations outside
their own nation-states.''

The United States is uniquely implicated in this charge because of its
enormous military, economic and cultural power. What drove people
around the world crazy about the Bush administration's unilateral
approach to the Iraq war was its assertion that it was accountable to
no one but American voters for what it did in distant parts of the
globe. And since institutions like the United Nations are woefully ill
equipped to deal with democratic legitimacy, this democracy deficit is
a real and abiding challenge at the international level.

The authors are conscious of the charge that they, like the Seattle
anti-globalization protesters they celebrate, don't have any real
solutions to these matters, so they spend some time discussing how to
fix the present international institutions. Their problem is that any
fixes are politically difficult if not impossible to bring about, and
promise only marginal benefits. Democratic institutions that work at
the nation-state level don't work at global levels. A true global
democracy, in which all of the earth's billions of people actually
vote, is an impossible dream, while existing proposals to modify the
United Nations Security Council or change the balance of power between
it and the General Assembly are political nonstarters. Making the World
Bank and I.M.F. more transparent are worthy projects, but hardly
solutions to the underlying issue of democratic accountability. The
United States, meanwhile, has stood in the way of new institutions like
the International Criminal Court.

It is at this point that Hardt and Negri take leave of reality —
arriving at an imaginary solution to their real problem. They argue
that instead of ''repeating old rituals and tired solutions'' we need
to begin ''a new investigation in order to formulate a new science of
society and politics.'' The woolliness of the subsequent analysis is
hard to overstate. According to them, the fundamental obstacle to true
democracy is not just the monopoly of legitimate force held by
nation-states, but the dominance implied in virtually all hierarchies,
which give certain individuals authority over others. The authors dress
up Marx's old utopia of the withering away of the state in the
contemporary language of chaos theory and biological systems,
suggesting that hierarchies should be replaced with networks that
reflect the diversity and commonality of the ''multitude.''

The difficulty with this line of reasoning is that there is a whole
class of issues networks can't resolve. This is why hierarchies, from
nation-states to corporations to university departments, persist, and
why so many left-wing movements claiming to speak on behalf of the
people have ended up monopolizing power. Indeed, the powerlessness and
poverty in today's world are due not to the excessive power of
nation-states, but to their weakness. The solution is not to undermine
sovereignty but to build stronger states in the developing world.

To illustrate, take the very different growth trajectories of East
Asia and sub-Saharan Africa over the past generation. Two of the
fastest growing economies in the world today happen to be in the two
most populous countries, China and India; sub-Saharan Africa, by
contrast, has tragically seen declining per capita incomes over the
same period. At least part of this difference is the result of
globalization: China and India have integrated themselves into the
global economy, while sub-Saharan Africa is the one part of the world
barely touched by globalization or multinational corporations.

But this raises the question of why India and China have been able to
take advantage of globalization, while Africa has not. The answer has
largely to do with the fact that the former have strong, well-developed
state institutions providing basic stability and public goods. They had
only to get out of the way of private markets to trigger growth. By
contrast, modern states were virtually unknown in most of sub-Saharan
Africa before European colonialism, and the weakness of states in the
region has been the source of its woes ever since.

Any project, then, to fix the ills of ''empire'' has to begin with the
strengthening, not the dismantling, of institutions at the nation-state
level. This will not solve the problems of global governance, but
surely any real advance here will come only through slow, patient
innovation and the reform of international institutions. Hardt and
Negri should remember the old insight of the Italian Marxist Antonio
Gramsci, taken up later by the German Greens: progress is to be
achieved not with utopian dreaming, but with a ''long march through
institutions.''

[Francis Fukuyama, a professor of international political economy at
Johns Hopkins University, is the author of State-Building: Governance
and World Order in the 21st Century.]