Books for Burning
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to note that this is a — post-Marxist — theory of globalization that explicitly denies the possibility of counter-hegemony at the global level. In summary, this is a thought-provoking new publication: it will be widely read and debated. For me, the book raised more questions than it answered. For example, is it sufficient to iterate, in a climate of domestic consensus, the continued importance of the Left/Right distinction as a means of facilitating constructive partisan conflict? Or does this need to be accompanied by a more spirited defense of the emancipatory aims of the Left? Similarly, is the transformation of ‘antagonism’ into ‘agonism’ an end in itself as Mouffe suggests? Or is this really a strategic question, that is, an appropriate objective in some contexts but (perhaps) not in others (such as the exploited and impoverished areas of the global south)? It is a virtue of this book to invoke these sorts of reflections. Mark Wenman University of Nottingham, UK Books for Burning Antonio Negri Verso, London, 2005, 336pp. ISBN: 1 844 6703 41. Contemporary Political Theory (2007) 6, 376–378. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300294
This book brings together a number of Antonio Negri’s controversial essays from the 1970s. The title of this book is somewhat misleading, as the essays collected here are not primarily about either democracy or civil war. Rather, they attempt to derive a strategy for social transformation (conceived in orthodox Marxist terms) from an analysis of economic changes in what might be called the transition to postmodern capitalism. The texts (along with others by the likes of Raniero Panzieri and Sergio Bologna) served as the theoretical underpinnings for autonomia, a Marxist current heavily involved in the social upheavals in 1970s Italy. Not for the faint-hearted either theoretically or politically, these essays offer an uncompromisingly radical (if at times somewhat Leninist) political perspective enmeshed within an erudite and conceptually dense discourse of continental philosophy and theoretical Marxism. One major strength of these essays is that they recognize and theorize tendencies in contemporary capitalism ahead of their time. The descriptions of the functioning of capitalism are in many ways profound, even prophetic; Negri discusses changes in the world economy which it took the rest of academia another 20 years to recognize — as for instance when he writes of the rise of transnational corporations and the resultant crisis of the nation-state Contemporary Political Theory 2007 6
Book Reviews
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(pp. 24, 166–167). Negri attempts to draw a political perspective from such changes, arguing that capitalism is becoming increasingly violent and irrational because of the collapse of the functioning of the law of value. In place of this law, capitalism falls back on ‘command’, in which the state plays a ‘monstrous role as the technical organ of domination’ (p. 5). Paradoxically, this increasingly powerful state does not become autonomous, but rather, is fused ever more closely into cap
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