Porto allegre : Interview with Michael Hardtn (Empire)

Philosopher Michael Hardt, , author of ?Empire?, says that the USA changes tactics to maintain hegemony

Little has changed. This is the opinion of American philosopher Michael Hardt, five months after the attacks of September 11. For him, the world continues practically the same. ?It has become easier to say that everything has changed?, he warns. Hardt, professor of literature at Duke University in North Carolina, is author, together with Italian philosopher and political scientist Antonio Negri, of one of the most impotant books of 2001, Empire. The work is a snapshot of globalization as a phenomenon which, if on the one hand buried the old imperialism, has on the other created what the authors call an imperial system, a network of global power more powerful than the action of the United States and its armies. Hardt is in Brazil to participated, from Wednesday, in the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, the international meeting of members of the worldwide left intelligentsia. Today, in Rio de Janeiro, he is awaited in the closing debate of the Vozes do milenio [voices of the millennium] series, which aims to think globalization through [*] and which is promoted by the School of Communications of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and by the Republic?s Museum. The meeting will take place at 3pm in the auditory of the Science and Culture Forum of the UFRJ. At 43 years of age Hardt is preoccupied with the creation of an ?old times? democracy, with equality and collective participation and says that the left should be more utopian. Next, his interview:

- How do you explain that a book about globalization, with so clearly a Marxist reading as Empire has become an editorial success?

I don?t know exactly, but I think that this might have happened because the book is utopian. I do not mean utopian in the sense of something which cannot be, but in the sense that we believe the world can be better. I think that there is a lack of utopian thinking in the left today.

- And people miss this utopia?

And this is understandable. But I don?t think that the process is understood in its full complexity. The amercian media had difficulties understanding the book. People asked me if globalization was good or bad. The answer is: neither and both. And this is also hard for people to understand. Most people who liked the book are opposed to neoliberalism. But there is not only an option between neoliberalism and the previous model. Many aspects of globalization, the economic, the cultural and the political are bad, are forms of exploitation. But at the same time, the same process caries an intense potential for liberation.

- What can be said today, sometime after the attacks of September 11 2001?

I think that there is much exaggeration regarding how much things have changed after that day. Without doubt, something changed, it?s undeniable, but it has become very easy for people to say that everything has changed, that this is now another world. These same people, however, say the same things they said before September 11. [Touché]

- What has changed then?

After what happened, it seems that the United States has returned to an old style of imperialist action, like the European imperialist powers of a hundred years ago. This is true, but it is not central. The most important aspects have not changed. In the last ten years, the military and diplomatic ideology of the United States has had two dimensions. One is this imperialist movement, with military actions in the Gulf , in Bosnia, etc. But another is the imperial ideology. That is, it acts for global interests, with a new logic of power which is not that of the nation-state.

- And how does it work?

When we spoke in the debate about human rights in Kosovo, some said that the American army?s discourse of promotion of human rights is an ideological mystification [* tense is present in the original] and that, in reality, they are only an imperialist power. I think that there is an ambiguity, even contradiction, in the ideology of the American army and diplomacy? the two principles are acting at the same time. In what refers to the episodes of September 11, the imperialist dimension is more apparent because the United States is talking tough, with the voice of a Nation-State protecting its own territory. But Antonio Negri and I believe that, in the long term, the imperial logic will be more effective and the imperialist logic will no longer succeed. The scenario of the old imperialism is ineffective to fight against this new enemy which emerged with the (terrorist) attacks. It is for this reason that the Americans are perplexed. There is much discussion in the American armed forces about what is an enemy which operates through a network and how to attack it. Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups are networks. The old form of military and political control is not able to attack a structure like this. The imperial form is more effective.

- But isn?t the American State increasingly more powerful than other states?

This is true. But when we say that the Nation-States, even the most powerful such as the United States, are declining, this does not mean that they are less important. It means that the kind of domination which they exert is decomposing [literally unmaking itself; se desfazendo]. This power is assuming new forms. Dutch sociologist Saskia Sassen says that the ministers in charge of the global economy exert local functions, but connected to a global vision. She uses Davos ? as example of a species of training camp, where these ministers meet other economists and go home afterwards to continue the old functions [perhaps: roles] related to their own countries. But they do not do this in a national theatre. The functionaries of the American government are in fact managing global capital.

- Do you think that after September 11 the left has come to be victim of revenge against anti-Americanism?

Soon after that event, the rightwing press in the USA begun to say that the antiglobalization movements were as bad as terrorism. Four articles in rightwing weekly magazines said that I, Antonio Negri and our book Empire were responsible for September 11.

- What were the arguments?

First there was the National Review, then the New Republic , New Criterium and the Weekly Standard. This last one, by the way, does not mention only us, but also says that Martin Heidegger is the intellectual mentor of the left (in the articles The Imperial Left ? Why American academics love Hardt and Negri?s ?Empire? and Postmodern Jihad ? What Osama bin Laden learned from the left). Clearly Heidegger was never a left-wing intellectual. All this was the product of a weak understanding of what we wrote and is ideological in the worst sense. The ideological right saw an opportunity to use all that patriotism to attack its enemies. But I think that we have already overcome this problem.

arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)