Part 3 (1/2)

In its heyday in the American south, slavery never lacked for apologists. Writers, preachers, and planters chimed in to defend the peculiar inst.i.tution as divinely ordained and justified by the racial superiority of whites over blacks. The Abolitionists, who burned the Const.i.tution, hid fugitives, and attacked federal a.r.s.enals, were widely viewed as dangerous firebrands fit for prison or the gallows.

In hindsight, the word ”slavery” connotes a world of oppression, violence, degradation, and resistance. The vile, deluded racism of slavery's 19th century apologists is unmistakable from our 21st century viewpoint, but how many see our century's version of slavery in a similarly revealing light?

In the name of progress, world development and empire are enslaving humankind and destroying nature, everywhere. The juggernaut known as globalization has absorbed nearly all opposition, overwhelming resistance by means of an implacable, universalizing system of capital and technology.' A sense of futility that approaches nihilism is now accepted as an inevitable response to modernity: ”Whatever....” The poverty of theory is starkly illuminated in this fatalistic atmosphere. Academic bookshelves are loaded with tomes that counsel surrender and accommodation to new realities. Other enthusiasts have climbed onto the globalization bandwagon, or more commonly, were never not on board. From an abolitionist perspective, the response of most intellectuals to a growing planetary crisis consists of apologia in endless variations.

Patrick Brantlinger' suggests, for example, that in the ”post-historical” age we have lost the ability to explain social change. But the reasons behind global change become evident to those who are willing to examine fundamental a.s.sumptions. The debasing of life in all spheres, now proceeding at a quickening pace, stems from the dynamics of civilization itself. Domestication of animals and plants, a process only io,ooo years old, has penetrated every square inch of the planet. The result is the elimination of individual and community autonomy and health, as well as the rampant, accelerating destruction of the natural world. Morris Berman, Jerry Mander, and other critics have described the ”disenchantment” of a world subordinated to technological development. Civilization subst.i.tutes mediation for direct experience, distancing people from their natural surroundings and from each other. Ever greater anomie, dispersal, and loneliness pervade our lives. A parallel instrumentalism is at work in our ecosystems, transforming them into resources to be mined, and imperiling the entire biosphere.3 At base, globalization is nothing new. Division of labor, urbanization, conquest, dispossession, and diasporas have been part and parcel of the human condition since the beginning of civilization. Yet globalization takes the domesticating process to new levels. World capital now aims to exploit all available life; this is a defining and original trait of globalization. Early zoth century observers (Tunnies and Durkheim among them) noted the instability and fragmentation that necessarily accompanied modernization. These are only more evident in this current, quite possibly terminal stage. The project of integration through world control causes disintegration everywhere: more rootlessness, withdrawal, pointlessness... none of which have arrived overnight. The world system has become a high-tech imperialism. The new frontier is cybers.p.a.ce. In the language of perennial empire, global powers issue their crusading, adventurous call to tame and colonize (or recolonize).4 Marshall McLuhan's ”global village” concept is back in vogue, albeit with a clonal tinge to it, as everyone is designated to be part of a single global society. One interdependent McWorld, kept alive by the standardized sadness of a draining consumerism. It should be no surprise that among those who speak in the name of ”anti-globalization” there are actually a growing number who in fact oppose it, whose perspective is that of de-globalization.

The ”global village,” subject to almost instantly worldwide epidemics' , has become a downright scary place. Since the 198os the term ”risk” has become pervasive in almost every discursive field or discipline in developed societies. The power of nation-states to ”manage” risks has demonstrably declined, and individual anxiety has increased, with the spread of modernization and globalization.6 This trajectory also brings growing disillusionment with representative government and a rising, if still largely inchoate anti-modern orientation. These outlooks have strongly informed anti-authoritarian movements in recent years. There is a perceived hollowness, if not malevolence, to basic social inst.i.tutions across the board. As Manuel Castells puts it, ”we can perceive around the world an extraordinary feeling of uneasiness with the current process of technology-led change that threatens to generate a widespread backlash.”7 A technified world continues to proliferate, offering the promise of escape from the less and less attractive context of our lives. Hoping noone realizes that technology is centrally responsible for impoverished reality, its hucksters spread countless enticements and promises, while it continues to metastasize. Net/Web culture (a revealing nomenclature) is a prime example, extending its deprived version of social existence via virtual s.p.a.ce. Now that embedded, face-to-face connectivity is being so resolutely annihilated, it's time for virtual community.

According to Rob s.h.i.+elds' chilling formulation, ”the presence of absence is virtual.”8 ”Community” is unlike any other in human memory; no real people are present and no real communication takes place. In convenient, disembodied virtual community, one shuts people off at the click of a mouse to ”go” elsewhere. Pseudo-community moves forward on the ruins of what is left of actual connections. Senses and sensuality diminish apace;9 ”responsibility” is interred in the expanding postmodern Lost Words Museum. Shriveled opposition and fatalistic, resigned s.h.i.+rkers forget that anti-slavery abolitionists, once a tiny minority, refused to quit and eventually prevailed.

Certainly none of this has happened overnight. The AT&T telephone commercial/exhortation of some years back, ”Reach out and touch someone,” offered human contact but concealed the truth that such technology has in fact been crucial in taking us ever further from that contact. Direct experience is replaced by mediation and simulation. Digitized information supplants the basis of actual closeness and possible trust among interacting physical beings. According to Boris Groys, ”We just have to deal with the fact that we can no longer believe our eyes, our ears. Everyone who has worked with a computer knows that.”'

Globalization is likewise scarcely new on the economic and political scene. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels predicted the emergence of a world market, based on growing production and consumption patterns of their day. The Spanish empire, 300 years earlier, was the first global power network.

Marx contended that every technology releases opposing possibilities of emanc.i.p.ation and domination. But somehow the project of a humanized technology has proven groundless and result-free; only technified humanity has come to pa.s.s. Technology is the embodiment of the social order it accompanies, and in its planetary advance transfers the fundamental ethos and values behind that technology. It never exists in a vacuum and is never value-neutral. Some alleged critics of technology speak, for example, of advancing ”to a higher level of integration between humanity and nature.”” This ”integration” cannot avoid echoing the integration that is basic to civilization and its globalization; namely, the cornerstone inst.i.tutions that integrate all into themselves. Foremost among them is division of labor.

A state of growing pa.s.sivity in everyday life is one of the most basic developments. Increasingly dependent-even infantilized-by a technological life-world, and under the ever-more complete effective control of specialized expertise, the fractionated subject is vitiated by division of labor. That most fundamental inst.i.tution, which defines complexity and has driven domination forward ab origino. Source of all alienation, ”the subdivision of labour is the a.s.sa.s.sination of a people.”” Adam Smith in the 18th century has perhaps never been excelled in his eloquent portrait of its mutilating, deforming, immiserating nature. ”

It was the prerequisite for domestication '14 and continues to be the motor of the Megamachine, to use Lewis Mumford's term. Division of labor underlies the paradigmatic nature of modernity (technology) and its disastrous outcome.

Although the wind is s.h.i.+fting in some quarters, it's somewhat baffling that theory has seldom put into question this inst.i.tution (or domestication, for that matter). The latent desire for wholeness, simplicity, and the immediate or direct has been overwhelmingly dismissed as futile and/or irrelevant. ”The task we now face is not to reject or turn away from complexity but to learn to live with it creatively,” advises Mark Taylor.” We must ”resist any simple nostalgia,” counsels Katherine Hayles, while granting that ”nightmare” may well describe what's been showing up lately.”

In fact, even more confounding than lack of interest in the roots and motive force undergirding the present desolation is the fairly widespread embrace of the prospect of more of the same. How is it possible to imagine good outcomes from what is clearly generating the opposite, in every sphere of life? Instead of a hideously cyborgian program delivering emptiness and dehumanization on a huge scale, Hayles, for instance, finds in the posthuman an ”exhilarating prospect” of ”opening up new ways of thinking about what being human means,” while high-tech ”systems evolve toward an open future marked by contingency and unpredictability.” ''

What's happening is that a ”what we have lost” sensibility is being overwhelmed by a ”what have we got to lose/try anything” orientation. This s.h.i.+ft testifies profoundly to the depth of loss and defeat that civilization/patriarchy/industrialism/modernity has engineered. The magnitude of the surrender of these intellectuals has nullified their capacity for a.n.a.lysis or vision. For example, ”Increasingly the question is not whether we will become posthuman, for posthumanity is already here.'”'

Technology as an injunction to forget, as a solvent of meaning,” finds its cultural voice in postmodernism. Articulated in the context of transnationalism whereby globalization renders its totalizing nature glaringly evident, postmodernism pursues its refusal of ”any notion of representable or essential totality.”' Helplessness reigns; there are no foundational places left from which to think about or resist the juggernaut. As Scott Lash states, ”We can no longer step outside of the global communications flows to find a solid fulcrum for critique.”” His misnamed Critique of Information announces total abdication: ”My argument in this book is that such critique is no longer possible. The global information order itself has, it seems to me, erased and swallowed up the possibility of a s.p.a.ce of critical reflection.””

With no ground from which to make judgments, the very viability of criteria dissolves; the postmodern thus becomes prey to every manner of preposterous and abject p.r.o.nouncement. I. Bluhdorn, for example, simply waves the little matter of environmental catastrophe away: ”To the extent that we manage to get used to (naturalize) the non-availability of universally valid normative standards, the ecological problem... simply dissolves.”” The cynical acceptance of every continuing horror, clothed in aesthetized irony and implicit apathy.

Downright bizarre is the incoherent celebration of the marriage of the postmodern and the technological, summed up in a t.i.tle: The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium.14 According to authors Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, ”The postmodern adventure is just beginning and alternative futures unfold all around us.” To speak of defending the particular against universalizing tendencies is a postmodern commonplace, but this is mocked by the eager acceptance of the most universalizing force of all, the h.o.m.ogenization machine which is technology.

Andrew Feenberg discusses the all-pervasive presence of technology, arguing that when the Left joins in the celebration of technological advances, the ensuing consensus leaves little to disagree about. A leftist himself, Feenberg concludes that ”we cannot recover what reification has lost by regressing to pretechnological conditions, to some prior unity irrelevant to the contemporary world.”” But such ”relevance” is what is really at issue. To remain committed to the ”contemporary world” is precisely the foundationless foundation of complicity. Postmodernity as the realization or completion of universal technology, globalization's underlying predicate.

When the basics are ruled off-limits to contestation, the resulting evasion can have no liberatory consequence. Infatuation with surface, the marginal, the partial, etc. is typical. Postmodernism billed itself as subversive and destabilizing, but delivered only aesthetically. Emblematic of a period of defeat, the image consumes the event and we consume the images. The tone throughout Derrida's work, for instance, seems never far from mourning. The abiding sadness of Blanchot is also to the point. The postmodern, according to Geoffery Hartman, ”suggests a disenchantment that is final, or self-perpetuating.””

The subject, in the current ethos, is seen on the one hand as an unstable, fragmented collection of positions in discourse-even as a mere effect of power, or of language-and on the other hand as part of a positive, pluralist array of alternatives. By avoiding examination of the main lines of domination, however, postmodernists blind themselves to the actual, deforming characteristics of technology and consumerism. The forgetful self of technology, buffeted by the ever-s.h.i.+fting currents of commodified culture, is hard-pressed to form an enduring ident.i.ty. There is, in fact, an increasing distance between dominant global forces and the endangered coherent individual.

The high-tech network of the world system is completing the transformation of cla.s.ses into ma.s.ses, the erosion of group solidarity and autonomy, and the isolation of the self. As Bamyeh points out, these are the preconditions of modern ma.s.s democracies, as well as the basic political features of global modernity itself.' Meanwhile, partic.i.p.ation in this setup dwindles, as a ma.s.sified, standardized techno-world makes a joke of the idea that any of it could be changed on its own terms. Elections, for instance, are widely understood to be insulting and meaningless rituals, technicized and commodified exercises in manipulation.” Fulfillment and freedom are fast evaporating, while the predominant note of social theory seems to be completely uncritical. The subject is merely a s.h.i.+fting intersection of global networks; ”the I is a moment of complexity,” says Mark Taylor in unconcerned summary. z9 Along with health-threatening obesity (largely due to the rapid spread of ”fast food” and other processed foods), depression has become an international scourge. Among various consequences of development, depression testifies directly to the loss of deeply important ingredients of human happiness. But as Lyotard has it, ”despair is taken as a disorder to control, never as the sign of an irremediable lack.”3 Already the fourth leading cause of disability in the U.S., depression is projected to take second place by 2020. Despite the general reactionary focus on genetics and chemical palliatives, depression has much more to do with the growing isolation of individuals within developed society. The figures about declining social and civic members.h.i.+p or affiliation are relevant; the rise of autism, binge drinking, and illiteracy betoken depression's progres- sas an even more profound phenomenon. ”At the time of the so-called triumph of the West, why do so many people feel so c.r.a.ppy, so lonely, so abandoned?” asks philosopher Bruce Wils.h.i.+re.”

It should no longer appear paradoxical that a deepening malaise co-exists with the escalating importance of expertise in managing everyday life. People distrust the inst.i.tutions, and have lost confidence in themselves. Elissa Gootman's ”Job Description: Life of the Party” discusses hired party ”motivators,” professionals who guarantee successful socializing.” On a more serious note, instrumental rationality penetrates our lives at ever-younger ages. Kids as young as two are now routinely medicated for depression and insomnia.”

An array of postmodernisms and fundamentalisms seems to have displaced belief in the future. Marcuse wondered whether narcissism's yearning for completeness and perfection might not contain the germ of a different reality principle. Even whether, contra Hegel, reconciliation could only happen outside of historical time.34 Such ”critics” as there be (Chomsky, Derrida, Ricoeur, Plumwood, for example) call for a global governance/planning apparatus-under which, it must be said, the individual would have even less of a voice. Anti-totality Derridawants a ”New international,” apparently ignorant of the actual zero degree of ”democracy” that obtains in the current political jurisdictions. Such superficiality, avoidance, and illusion surely const.i.tutes acceptance of the ongoing devastation. Of course, if statist regulation could be an answer it would necessarily be totalitarian. And it would be partial at best, because it would never indict any of civilization's motive forces, such as division of labor or domestication.

What is clear to some of us is that a turn away from the virtual, global networks of power, unlimited media, and all the rest is a neces- sity.Abreakwith this worsening world toward embeddedness, the faceto-face, non-domination of nature and each other.

Todd Gitlin, while rejecting such a refusal as mere ”wishfulness,” is helpful on the subject: ”So consistent abolitionists have little choice but to be root-and-branch, scorch-and-burn primitivists, scornful of the rewards of a consumer society, committed to cutting the links in the invisible chain connecting modern production, consumption, and the technologies implicated in both. Only unabashed primitivists can create postindustrial wholeness .”14 Overman and Unab.u.mber.

Born a hundred years apart, the lives of Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodore Kaczynski contain some important parallels. Both refused extremely promising academic careers: Nietzsche in philology, Kaczynski in mathematics. Each tried to make the most of a basically solitary existence. ”Philosophy, as I have understood and lived it to this day, is a life voluntarily spent in ice and high mountains,” said Nietzsche in Ecce h.o.m.o. For Kaczynski, the ice and high mountains were a more literal description, given his years in a cabin in the Montana Rockies.

Leslie Chamberlain (Nietzsche in Turin, London, 1996) summed up Nietzsche's experience as ”G.o.dless, jobless, wifeless and homeless.” Kaczynski wandered less, but the characterization fits him very closely, too. Both were failures in relating to women, and uninterested in considering the condition of women in society. The two were both menaced at times by illness and impoverishment. Each was betrayed by his only sibling: Nietzsche by his sister Elizabeth, who tampered with his writings when he was helpless to prevent her; Kaczynski by his brother David, who fingered him for the FBI.

Nietzsche's central concept was the will to power. Kaczynski's big idea was the power process.

Both extolled strength and attacked pity: Nietzsche with his critique of Christianity as an unhealthy ”slave morality,” Kaczynski in terms of leftism as a dishonest projection of personal weakness.

Each developed, at base, a moral psychology, although Kaczynski is not limited to a psychology.

Nietzsche's a.n.a.lysis is contained within culture. His quest for a regeneration of the human spirit and the fulfillment of the individual is essentially aesthetic. Art, in many ways, replaced G.o.d for him. His postChristian artistic vision is the measure of the Dionysian ”revaluation of values.” ”What matters most... is always culture” (Twilight of the G.o.ds).

There is no getting around Nietzsche's belief in hierarchy, his justification of rank and exploitation. Kaczynski's anarchist vision called for free community, decentralized to the point of face-to-face interaction.

Kaczynski, like Nietzsche, also desires virility over decadence, but saw that this can only be realized in terms of a social transformation. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche blamed ”the democratization of Europe” for what he saw as a herd mentality. In Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski recognized that a much deeper change than the political (not to mention the aesthetic) would be needed for the individual to be fre and fulfilled. He understood the logic of industrialized life to be the obstacle, and called for its destruction. For him, how everyday life is experienced was a far more important factor than abstract values or aesthetic expression. Nietzsche and Kaczynski thus see the values crisis quite differently. Especially in the persona of Zarathustra, Nietzsche calls for personal redemption through an act of the will. Kaczynski does not overlook the context of the individual, the forces that frustrate his/her life at a basic level.

Nietzsche focused on German culture, e.g. the case of Wagner. Kaczynski examined the movement and consequences of an increasingly artificial and estranging global industrial order.

Nietzsche affirmed the free spirit in books such as Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science, only to question the existence of free will in other texts. Kaczynski showed that individual autonomy is problematic in modern society, and that this problem is a function of that society.

Both Nietzsche and Kaczynski are seen as nihilists by many. The prevailing postmodern ethos elevates Nietzsche and ignores Kaczynski-largely because Nietzsche does not challenge society and Kaczynski does.

For postmodernism, the self is just a product, an outcome, nothing more than a surface effect. Nietzsche actually originated this stance (now also known as ”the death of the subject”), which can be found in many of his writings. Kaczynski expressed a determinate autonomy and showed that the individual has not been extinguished. One can lament the end of the sovereign individual and lapse into postmodern pa.s.sivity and cynicism, or diagnose the individual's condition in society and challenge this condition, as Kaczynski did.

Freud's Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, translated in the 192OS as Civilization and Its Discontents, reads more literally as ”what makes us uncomfortable about culture.” Nietzsche never questioned culture itself. Kaczynski shed light on why industrialism, the ground of culture, must be overcome for health and freedom to exist.

Why Primitivism?

Debord biographer Anselm Giap' referred to the puzzle of the present, ”where the results of human activity are so antagonistic to humanity itself,” recalling a question posed nearly 50 years ago by Joseph Wood Krutch: ”What has become of that opportunity to become more fully human that the 'control of nature' was to provide? ”'

The general crisis is rapidly deepening in every sphere of life. On the biospheric level, this reality is so well-known that it could be termed ba.n.a.l, if it weren't so horrifying. Increasing rates of species extinctions, proliferating dead zones in the world's oceans, ozone holes, disappearing rainforests, global warming, the pervasive poisoning of air, water, and soil, to name a few realities.

A grisly link to the social world is widespread pharmaceutical contamination of watersheds.' In this case, destruction of the natural world is driven by ma.s.sive alienation, masked by drugs. In the U.S., life-threatening obesity is sharply rising, and tens of millions suffer from serious depression and/or anxiety.4 There are frequent eruptions of multiple homicides in homes, schools, and workplaces, while the suicide rate among young people has tripled in recent decades.5 Fibromy- algia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and other ”mystery” /psychosomatic illnesses have multiplied, vying with the emergence of new diseases with known physiological origins: Ebola, La.s.sa fever, AIDS, Legionnaires' disease. The illusion of technological mastery is mocked by the antibiotic-resistant return of TB and malaria, not to mention outbreaks of E coli, mad cow disease, West Nile virus, etc. Even a cursory survey of contemporary psychic immiseration would require many pages. Barely suppressed anger, a sense of emptiness, corrosion of belief in inst.i.tutions across the board, high stress levels, all contribute to what Kornoouh has called ”the growing fracture of the social bond.”6 Today's reality keeps underlining the inadequacy of current theory and its overall retreat from any redemptive project. It seems undeniable that's what's left of life on earth is being taken from us. Where is the depth of a.n.a.lysis and vision to match the extremity of the human condition and the fragility of our planet's future? Are we simply only with a totalizing current of degradation and loss?

The crisis is diffuse, but at the same time it is starkly visible on every level. One comes to agree with Ulrich Beck that ”people have begun to question modernity.. its premises have begun to wobble. Many people are deeply upset over the house-of-cards character of superindustrialism.”7 Agnes h.e.l.ler observed that our condition becomes less stable and more chaos-p.r.o.ne the further we move away from nature, contrary to the dominant ideology of progress and development.$ With disenchantment comes a growing sense that something different is urgently needed.

For a new orientation the challenge is at a depth that theorists have almost entirely avoided. To go beyond the prospectless malaise, the collapse of social confidence so devastatingly expressed in Les Particules Elementaires (Michel Houlebecq's end-of-the-millennium novel),' the a.n.a.lytical perspective simply must s.h.i.+ft in a basic way. This consists, for openers, in refusing Foucault's conclusion that human capacities and relations are inescapably technologized '

As Eric Vogelin put it, ”The death of the spirit is the price of progress.”” But if the progress of nihilism is identical to the nihilism of progress, whence comes the rupture, the caesura? How to pose a radical break from the totality of progress, technology, modernity?

A quick scan of recent academic fads shows precisely where such a perspective has not been found. Frederic Jameson's apt formulation introduces the subject for us: ”Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.””

Postmodernism is the mirror of an ethos of defeat and reaction, a failure of will and intellect that has accommodated to new extremities of estrangement and destructiveness..” For the postmodernists, almost nothing can be opposed. Reality, after all, is so messy, s.h.i.+fting, complex, indeterminate; and oppositions are, of course, just so many false bina- risms. Vacuous jargon and endless side-stepping transcend pa.s.se dualisms. Daniel White, for example, prescribed ”a postmodern-ecological rubric that steps past the traditional either-or of the Oppressor and Oppressed... ”14 In the consumerist realm of freedom, ”this complex node, where technologies are diffused, where technologies are chosen,” according to Mike Michael '15 who can say if anything is at all amiss? lain Chambers is an eloquent voice of postmodern abjectness, wondering whether alienation is not simply an eternal given: ”What if alienation is a terrestrial constraint destined to frustrate the 'progress' introjected in all teleologies?... Perhaps there is no separate, autonomous alternative to the capitalist structuring of the present-day world. Modernity, the westernization of the world, globalization, are the labels of an economic, political and cultural order that is seemingly installed for the foreseeable future.”'6 The fixation on surface (depth is an illusion; so are presence and immediacy), the ban on unifying narratives and inquiry into origins, indifference to method and evidence, emphasis on effects and novelty, all find their expression in postmodern culture at large. These att.i.tudes and practices spread everywhere, along with the technology it embraces without reservation. At the same time, though, there are signs that these trivializing and derivative recipes for ”thought” may be losing their appeal.'' An antidote to postmodern surrender has been made available, largely through what is known as the anti-globalization movement.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, who once thought that technologized existence offered options, has begun to write about the sinister development of a neo-totalitarian, instrumentalist imprisonment. In earlier essays he pointed to a loss of affect as part of the postmodern condition. More recently he has attributed that loss to techno-scientific hegemony. Crippled individuals are only part of the picture, as Lyotard portrays social effects of what can only be called instrumental reason, in pathological ascendance. And contra Habermas, this domination by instrumental reason is in no way challenged by ”communicative action.”” Referring to global urban development, Lyotard stated, ”We inhabit the megalopolis only to the extent that we declare it uninhabitable. Otherwise, we are just lodged there.” Also, ”with the megalopolis, what is called the West realizes and diffuses its nihilism. It is called development.”'9 In other words, there may be a way out of the postmodern cul-desac, at least for some. Those still contained by the Left have a much different legacy of failure to jettison-one that obviously transcends the ”merely” cultural. Discredited and dying as an actual alternative, this perspective surely also needs to go.

Hardt and Negri's Empire' will serve as a cla.s.sic artifact of leftism, a compendium of the worn-out and left-over. These self-described communist militants have no notion whatsoever of the enveloping crisis. Thus they continue to seek ”alternatives within modernity.” They locate the force behind their communist revolution in ”the new productive practices and the concentration of productive labor on the plastic and fluid terrain of the new communicative, biological, and mechanical technologies.”” The leftist a.n.a.lysis valiantly upholds the heart of productionist marxism, in the face of ever-advancing, standardizing, destructive technique. Small wonder Hardt and Negri fail to consider the pulverization of indigenous cultures and the natural world, or the steady worldwide movement toward complete dehumanization.

Claude Kornoouh considers monstrous ”the idea that progress consists in the total control of the genetic stock of all living beings.” For him, this would amount to an unfreedom ”that even the bloodiest totalitarianism of the zoth century was not able to accomplish.”” Hardt and Negri would not shrink from such control, since they do not question any of its premises, dynamics, or preconditions.