READINGS

Readers will have guessed that this blog is under construction.  Until my friend Martha sets up a second column on the front page, I'll use the blog column to signal stuff that may not be current then.  This week's double issue of The Nation has an article by Michael Hardt, who, with Antonio Negri wrote Empire and Multitude, and that opens new windows.  In my forthcoming Memoir I write that the Bush administration is not so much against world government as it is against world DEMOCRATIC government, and that a world government of sorts already exists, which I call a corporatocracy.  Hardt, Negri and many others call it a new kind of empire.  Where I see Bush as a sort of CEO who, like a King has to contend with restive Princes, Hardt sees "a wide network of collaborating powers, including the dominant nation-states, supranational institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, the major corporations, some of the major NGOs and others."  This, says Negri is the new global power that will "maintain global hierarchies , keeping the rich rich and the poor poor."

Focusing on Lain America, Negri points to  the encouragement of autonomous movements as the most significant factor in the Chavez revolution, corresponding to what he calls power to the multitude, which can include many groups, as opposed to "the people" which evokes nationalism.