Biopolitical Production

Tractarian Dualism: Robert E. Tully, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto

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Alter-Globalism and New Social Movements by Alexander Buzgalin
National Consciousness by Frantz Fanon (1967)
Postmodern Politics by Steven Best and Douglas Kellner (1991)
Porto Alegre: Today's Bandung? a critic by Michael Hardt

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The following text is taken from the preface of EMPIRE by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) [without permission] and used (freely) as an introduction to the on-going DEBATE on the issue of Globalization.

My interest in this debate may be stated as follows:

1. what is meant by the statement, "Another world is possible"?
2. in a new global world, regarded in Empire as a 'paradigm shift', what role can/does the tradition of humanism play?
3. how to act?

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"We should emphasise that we use "Empire" here not as a metaphor, which would require demonstration of resemblances between today's world order and the Empires of Rome, China, the Americas, and so forth, but rather as a concept, which calls primarily for a theoretical approach. The concept of Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire's rule has no limits.

1. the concept of Empire posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really that rules over the entire "civilized" world
2. the concept of Empire presents itself not as a historical regime orginating in conquest, but rather as an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity
3. the rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depths of the social world
4. although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace - a perpetual and universal peace outside of history

An Alternative Globalization statement

The Empire we are faced with wields enormous powers of oppression and destruction, but that fact should not make us nostalgic in any way for the old forms of domination. The passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation. Globalization, of course, is not one thing, and the multiple processes that we recognise as globalization are not unified or univocal. Our political task, we will argue, is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them towards new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges. The struggles to contest and subvert Empire, as well as those to construct a real alternative, will thus take place on the imperial terrain itself - indeed, such new struggles have already begun to emerge. Through these struggles and many more like them, the multitude will have to invent new democratic forms and a new constituent power that will one day take us through and beyond Empire."

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The following text is taken from the last chapter of Voltaire's Bastards by John Ralston Saul (1992) [without permission].

"Jefferson put it that men by their constitution were naturally divided into two parts - those who fear and distrust the people versus those who identify with the people and have confidence in them. Our civilization has increasingly put those who fear and distrust in power over us. Those who have confidence have always argued that consciousness is the key to improvements in the human condition. But power structures have always treated consciousness in the citenry as a danger which must first be lulled, then channelled towards the inoffensive through the mechanisms of language, mythology and structure.

Societies either roll on blindly to disaster or they find the inner strength to stop themselves long enough to find ways for reform from within. That was the meaning of the great Athenian pause, when Solon was brought forward and encouraged "to shake off the burdens". They believed, as he wrote, that "the public evil enters the house of everyman, the gates of his courtyard cannot keep it out".

The changes which might help us to deal with our own difficulties can be easily listed: reestablish the division between policy and administration, for example, and end the cult of the Hero; widen the meaning of knowledge; end the alliance between barbarism (the generals, Heroes, stars, speculators) and technocracy; denigrate self-interest, meaningless power, cynicism, rhetoric; and, for that matter, simply change our elites.

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If the Socratic question can still be asked, it is certainly not rational. Voltaire pointed out that for the Romans, sensus communis meant common sense but also humanity and sensibility. It has been reduced to only good sense, "a state half-way between stupidity and intelligence". We have since reduced it still farther, as if appropriate only for manual labour and the education of small children. That is the narrowing effect of a civilization which seeks automatically to divide through answers when our desperate need is to unify the individual through questions."

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To further the debate please take the following links:

John Rawls - his politics
anti-globalization movement -
Paul Treanor - neoliberalism
Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations