Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

G L o b a L i z a t i o n a n d t H e s t a t e
The total control character of Empire diffuses through intricate
“nonplace” and “deterritorialized” networks, which are tricky
to pin down let alone resist. Such is very much an Althusserian
geography of power, a geopolitical process without any clearly
discernible subject or agent. Notwithstanding, Hardt and Negri
welcome the advent of Empire, and they root for anything that will
push it to its ultimate expanse; and the quicker the better! Here
they’re unashamedly Marxist in analytical scope, yet unequivocally
proglobalization in their political hopes. Thus, despite its
dread and foreboding, its abuses and misuses, “we insist on asserting
that the construction of Empire is a step forward in order to
do away with any nostalgia for the power structures that preceded
it. … We claim that Empire is better in the same way that Marx
insists that capital is better than the forms of society and modes
of production that came before it” (p. 43). Within Empire are the
seeds of its own demise: Empire, in short, produces its own grave
diggers. The virtual world it commandeers can eventually become
a “real virtuality,” where a transnational working class achieves
“global citizenship” (p. 361).
At that point, workers of the world will assert themselves as
“the concrete universal,” as “the multitude.” Hardt and Negri deign
for nothing less. The Left has to match a “deterritorialized” ruling
class by inventing a “deterritorialized” politics of its own, tackling
bad virtuality with good virtuality, fighting corporate globalization
with civic globalization, confronting a fluid and faceless enemy on
their terms, at the global scale. Here, the duo insists (p. 44), there’s
no place for “the localization of struggles.” Now, within the global
totality of capitalism, “place-based” activism is a bankrupted ploy:
at best misconceived, at worst reactionary. “This leftist strategy of
resistance to globalization and defense of locality is also damaging
because in many cases what appear as local identities are not
autonomous or self-determining but actually feed into and support
the development of the capitalist imperialist machine.” “It is
127