| |
|
Well, the first thing to note here is that the book is distinctly pre-911 - this claim would be obviously very difficult to justify following the significant international dissent to wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. Second, it ignores the vast number of US military interventions 'at one remove', where the US supplies and trains local militias to intervene where it would be unnecessarily costly for the US to wage war directly (i.e., many interventions throughout Latin America, the contras against the Sandinistas, etc.) Third, the US frequently, and again especially in Latin America, uses supposedly civil rationales to conceal military interventions, as when it sprays toxins over crops in Marxist-controlled areas under the aegis of the drug war. Finally, there is absolutely no evidence the US feels obliged to offer military backing where doing so would not directly support its interests, and indeed frequently supports terroristic aggression (i.e., by Saddam before he split from US backers, for colonial aggression by the state of Israel, etc.)
Those are a few obvious points off the top of my head, I'm sure there are more...
Incidentally, I have just been reading Immanuel Wallerstein's Historical Capitalism, which is a much shorter, more lucid, convincing, and engaging account of contemporary capital than Hardt and Negri's, for mine. |
|
|
It is always so cool to see D&G put to good use. It reminds me in place of the spirit of Bey's T.A.Z. and Immediocracy but far surpasses it in terms of actually dissecting the ways in which society is now experiencing social&political&economical changes and how one can actually go about living one's life in a world that is anything but "pure" and clear-cut but instead a hybrid and constantling miscenegating one (POSH rambling alert off).