Globality

Chapter Three ("Globality") contests the discourse of neoliberal globalization that has been endlessly repeated across the political spectrum over the past 40 years from the left as much as the right, in the academy as much as in the mainstream media: the claim that the world has entered a "post- class" moment in which class struggle is over because of the new "knowledge" economy and all that is left is to make do with capitalism. In this familiar story, cultural changes like the Internet and the new eco-friendly lifestyle politics are supposed to have empowered the people against totalitarian power by decentering and deregulating their lives so that they can find freedom in the local and everyday, the sphere of consumption, rather than, as in the past, through class struggle over the socio-economic conditions of production. I argue that what recent changes in global media and culture did in fact produce was a "cyber" imaginary that hides from view the class conflict in global capitalism so as to normalize the exploitation of wage-labor by capital that is at the center of capitalism. To support my claim I consider the social uprisings in Argentina, Venezuela and Peru in 2001 and argue that what they showed is that the only alternative to the extreme social inequality and instability of global capitalism is revolutionary class struggle. I then lay bare how this basic truth of Marxism is covered up by a thick layer of mystification by the corporate media through a variety of relays and mediations. Central to the ideological work of giving global capitalism the face of freedom by covering up its basic class inequality and what it makes necessary is Hardt and Negri's manifesto of the new capitalism (Empire), which for this reason was made an academic "best seller" and celebrated by such official organs of finance capital as The New York Times and Charlie Rose as "the next big thing." Calling the book "the next big thing" simply affirms the central premise of Empire that "imperialism is over" (Hardt and Negri 2000, xiv). It has been displaced by "empire": a "new form of sovereignty" (xi), where cyber-labor "creates the very world it inhabits" (xv).
Keywords: Negri; affective labor; Empire; Lenin; imperialism; globalization; Argentina; Latin America.