Thoughts on Hardt's "The Withering of Civil Society"

Hey folks,

[I meant to throw these comments out after our last reading group while the article was still fresh in our minds but never got around to it. I'd still like to hear your thoughts on mine...]

Hardt, and I think many autonomists suffer from an affliction common to many traditional Marxists, that being the believe/hope that the growth of productive forces will expand the spaces available for human freedom.

In the traditional account, new technologies, rationalized means of production, etc. realized through capitalist competion would eventually be appropriated/socialized and put to more humane uses. Moreover, the "creative destruction" wrought by capital would put an end to the ossified traditions of previous societies ushering in a modern world.

In Hardt, Negri and Virno's account, these same forces bring about changes in subjective capacities that will put an end to older forms of identity (the citizen) and bring about more radical politics putting an end to capital/Empire.

And I think this is connected to another problem, one found also in Foucault. They avoid an explanation of what makes resistance possible . While they spend considerable time exploring the subjective capacities developed within the antagonism between labour and capital, they seem to rely on some underlying, irrepressible essential kernal of subjectivity that always resists power. Foucault argues that people will always resist that which they find intolerable but he doesn't explain why, under what conditions, people come to find aspects of their lives intolerable. Perhaps this is a humanist subject sneaking in through the back door...? (For the record, seeing as Change the World Without Taking Power has come up as a possible reading, Holloway relies on a more explicitly humanist notion of the subject, one whose alienation under capitalism leads inevitably to resistance).

Early in our reading group, in the first one I think, we touched on the lack of a theory of consciousness in autonomist thought. I'd like to come back to this. With respect to understanding the conditions in which resistance arises I think some of the post-marxists (Laclau, Mouffe, Zizek, etc) are much more useful in the way they explore discursive struggle and the production of subjectivity.