Brothers in Marx

Brothers in Marx

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703298004574457113221769116.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Down with capitalists, nations, bosses, families, etc.

OCTOBER 7, 2009
By BRIAN C. ANDERSON

Astonishingly, given the ruin associated with his name, Karl Marx is
back in fashion. The global economic downturn has spurred sales of
"Das Kapital" to an all-time high; Michael Moore with his latest
movie rivals the Original Communist in denouncing the evils of
capitalism; and for the past year the news media seem to have
delighted in running obituaries for the owners of the means of
production. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, then, are nicely
positioned to take advantage of Marx's revival with the publication
of "Commonwealth," which re-imagines Marxism for the 21st century.

Mr. Hardt teaches literature at Duke University and is a
postmodernism-steeped radical­that is to say, he is an American
college professor. Mr. Negri, a political theorist, has a more
unusual background. Three decades ago, the Italian government
believed that he was the secret intellectual leader of the leftist
terrorists called the Red Brigades and that he was the architect of
the group's 1978 kidnapping and murder of Christian Democratic Party
leader Aldo Moro. Unable to build a sufficient case to try Mr. Negri
for murder­he has always denied the allegation­Italian authorities
convicted him of "armed insurrection against the state." Facing 30
years in the slammer, Mr. Negri scooted to France, where he remained,
a philosopher in exile, until 1997, when he returned to Italy to
serve the remainder of a reduced sentence. He is a left-wing guru
whose field work has occurred far from the faculty lounge.

"Commonwealth" completes a trilogy that began in 2000 with "Empire"
and continued with "Multitude" in 2004. The book is a witch's brew of
contemporary radicalism. Capitalism deserves to die, Messrs. Hardt
and Negri believe, for it has abused and corrupted "the common." The
common isn't just "the fruits of the soil, and all nature's bounty,"
they tell us; it is the universe of things necessary for social
life­"knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects." Under
capitalism, nature is ravaged, society brutalized.

Yet the conditions for people's emancipation are budding within
capitalism, the authors believe (just as Marx believed in the
mid-19th century). Unlike the factory laborer of yesterday, today's
knowledge worker has less and less need for a boss. Companies extract
the most value from the worker, we're told, when he is left alone to
create, connect and collaborate as he sees fit. This is also true of
"affective labor" that offers services to the public, "even in the
most constrained and exploited circumstances, such as call centers."

Messrs. Hardt and Negri propose getting rid of bosses, of course, but
they also target another bugaboo of the hard left, private property.
The possession of property supports unjust power structures­why not
agree that the "common wealth" of the human and natural worlds should
be everyone's responsibility, everyone's resource? Welcome to The
Communist Manifesto 2.0.

"Commonwealth" updates Marx's championing of the proletariat as the
agent of revolution. The authors prefer "the multitude," which
includes workers of all kinds, naturally, but also gathers the mighty
forces of identity politics: black and Hispanic activists, radical
feminists, "queer" transgressives and others purportedly harmed by
global capitalism. They don't all get along, Messrs. Hardt and Negri
admit, so the left must persuade this army-in-waiting to value the
importance of "revolutionary parallelism." No Black Power movement
that treats woman or homosexuals badly, for instance, will win the
day. After the revolution, we're told, identity politics, like class
warfare, will dissolve.

For the revolution to succeed, three supposedly corrupt forms of the
common must be destroyed. Some of the harshest language in
"Commonwealth" targets the family: Mom, dad and the kids might not
know it, but they are part of a "pathetic" institution, a "machine"
that "grinds down and crushes the common" with "the blindest egoism."
Messrs. Hardt and Negri cry: "Down with the family!" The two other
killers of the world's spirit: the corporation and the nation. When
the multitude seizes "control of the means of production and
reproduction," we're promised, the evil trio will wind up on Marx's
ash heap of history.

The authors warn the rulers of the capitalist world that if they want
to survive a little longer, they need to enact reforms, including
global citizenship, a right to income for everyone and participatory
democracy. But Messrs. Hardt and Negri don't think that their warning
will be heeded. Revolution will erupt­and soon. It could be violent,
a prospect that does not seem to trouble them: "What is the best
weapon against the ruling powers­guns, peaceful street
demonstrations, exodus, media campaigns, labor strikes, transgressing
gender norms, silence, irony, or many others­depends on the
situation." Pirates, the rioting Muslim banlieusards of Paris and the
Black Panthers all are praised in "Commonwealth" as heroes of disruption.

Messrs. Hardt and Negri make little effort to build arguments in
support of their wild assertions and predictions. They write as if
ignorant of the 20th century and of much else, including economics
and social science. (They still quote Lenin and Mao as if they were
sources of wise political and economic analysis.) How would
abolishing private property not lead to a threadbare totalitarian
state, as it has in the past? The authors promise it will be
different this time, without explaining why. If you abolish the
family, how will children grow into flourishing adults? We must take
it on faith that the post-family world will be just fine. (The word
"children" almost never appears in the book.) How do the authors
explain away capitalist globalization's record of elevating millions
of people out of poverty? Answer: They don't.

"Commonwealth" is a dark, evil book, and it is troubling that it
appears under the prestigious imprimatur of Harvard University Press.
Countless millions were slaughtered by adherents of Karl Marx in the
20th century. God help us if the scourge returns in the 21st.
--

Mr. Anderson, the editor of City Journal, is the author of
"Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents" and, with Adam Thierer,
"A Manifesto for Media Freedom."

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