The Empire's New Clothes By Frederick Luis Aldama

I read with great enthusiasm Timothy Brennan's timely, and informative essay, "The Empire's New Clothes" (Critical Inquiry. Vol. 29, no. 2, 2003).  First, Brennan's essay on Negri and Hardt's academic best-selling Empire leaves almost no stone unturned.  He shows how these two alchemists use their best rhetorical shots to persuade their readers that the fight against capitalism and all its monstrous consequences is no longer necessary because capitalism--as Brennan phrases it--has already provided us with an "inchoate communism."

Indeed, Hardt and Negri share much in common with others such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Michel de Certeau, Carl Schmitt, Paul Ricoeur, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and of course, the gurus of all gurus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hans Georg Gadamer, and Martin Heidegger.  That is, they all share a profound aversion toward the working class; they are all deeply contemptuous of the many attempts the workers have made the world over since the 19th-century to build their own organizations as weapons to fight capitalism and overthrow it, and they all blame the proletariat for the defeats it has suffered up to now.  Nietzsche's aristocratism; Blanchot's, Gadamer's, Schmitt's, and Heidegger's Naziphilia; Bataille's dark mysticism and fascistic leanings; Guattari, Deleuze's, and Lacan's abhorence to science while saturating their writings with puns, portmanteau words, and neologisms based on scientific terms; Foucault's, Negri/Hardt's ultra-leftism that in fact aspires to a perpetuation of capitalism; and Althusser's aim to defend both the Stalinist bureaucracy and the capitalist regime worldwide-- all this and more have been and still are among the most effective ideological weapons that the ruling classes have used to keep one generation after another of young students away from the knowledge that may lead them to join the emancipation struggle of the working-class populations.

It is odd that many scholars in humanities departments across the country continue to believe that they are furthering the cause of freedom from exploitation, oppression, and discrimination by teaching those authors and basing their own writings on the teachings of those authors. It's the world upside down.  Thanks to Brennan and a handful of other scholars, this is now changing.