Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Much of the recent discussion in social theory about the nature of value under capitalism stems from the work of Antonio Negri and the Italian autonomist tendency. This paper offers a classical Marxist response to Negri's Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse by locating points of disagreement with Negri's reading of the notebooks Marx compiled in preparation for writing Capital. In the Grundrisse, Marx engages in rare speculation about the future of capitalist development, speculation that Negri interprets as a departure from Marx's other works and uses to re-theorize the socialist project. The debate with Negri in this paper addresses his redefinition of the Marxist concept of value and develops a foundation for situating rhetorical and material agency in the struggle against capitalism.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In the '60s, Antonio Negri theorized the operaismo ("workerism"), a Neo-Marxist interpretation of class struggle in Western societies. A new worker, the mass-worker, was the leading subject of political confrontations in capitalistic societies. In the '70s, as capitalistic contradictions spread from factories to society, Negri proposed the theory of political autonomy. Autonomous political movements replaced workers leadership against capital, whose main instrument of domination was the state.
In their recent book, Empire, (Cambridge: 2000), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri go beyond those scenarios. They assume a supranational dimension of capitalistic confrontations. In Empire, class struggle is even further from being the key point of a Marxian political theory. Marxian dialectic, above all, is fragmented and deconstructed by multiple perspectives.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: For both Arrighi and Hardt and Negri (H&N), "Imperialism" to use Hardt and
Negri formulation "is over." Classical 19th and early 20th c. imperialism,
as the extension of national sovereignty beyond the borders of the
nation-state no longer organizes nor articulates the world economy. For H&N
imperialism has been replaced by imperium (Empire) or "a series of national
or supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule." Empire is a
consequence of the globalization of Capital which H&N claim is unlike the
global spread of capitalism which has characterized the previous 450 years
of the world economy As such, Empire, is a qualitative break with the past
and all previous forms of hegemony.



What remains unanswered and largely unexplored in H&N's formulations is the
genesis of Empire. Other than attributing Empire to the globalization of
Capital, H&N do not adequately account for Empire's genesis. How, in other
words, has the "centered" hegemony of the US in the 25 years after World War
II been transformed what H&N call a "decentered apparatus of rule."? Arrighi's
considerations of modern "imperialism" provide important extremely insights
into this process. By expanding on and updating Arrighi's thought, I will show how the
genesis of Empire is a direct consequence of the creation, by the US, of
the structural conditions which were the necessary prerequisites for the
unfettered global expansion of Capital.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Speculative theorists on new media face the problematic of negotiating the lack of words and standards to describe and assess the emergent future they envision. The works of Levy and Hardt and Negri reconceptualize information technology, time, and agency, yet, being speculative in character, they are under attack for being empirically invalid. Leaving empirical judgment aside, I explore the aesthetic regimes that these theorists ascribe to technological communication in relation to their politics.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: It could easily be argued that a central issue facing society today is one of geo-political boundaries and globalizations. In this paper, I will compare and contrast how Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Arjun Appaduarai and George Ritzer would address this issue.
Hardt and Negri argue that what we are witnessing today, on both local and global levels, is a comprehensive transformation of human life in an unprecedented way. They call the new order that is being realized in front of our eyes through the geopolitical and economic globalization Empire. Although George Ritzer and Arjun Appadurai accept this transformation of human life, they look at this event from different perspectives. For Ritzer, the grobalization can explain “the processes in which growth imperatives (e.g., the need to increase sales and profits from one year to next year in order to keep stock prices high and growing) push organizations and nations to expand globally and to impose themselves on the local (xiii).” On the other hand, Appaduari argues that the globe has begun to spin in new ways and offers a theory of rupture “that takes media and migration as its two major, and interconnected, diacritics and explores their joint effect on the work of imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity (3).”