Posts Tagged ‘war’

Blue s Clues Blue Bought it for my granddaughter. She watches it over and over. It is also educational. My one year old daughter loves it and my son loved it when he was two! Plus, mom and dad think it’s amusing …

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I read almost exclusively fiction and this book is an example of why, on those rare occasions when I summon the necessary moral fiber to read a non-fiction title, that I run scurrying back to stories about science fiction and detectives.

Multitude is, what exactly? Large parts of it are socio-political mumbo jumbo filled with slippery abstractions and meaningless code words and phrases – the second quarter of the book is practically unreadable for this reason.

At one point in this swill, Hardt and Negri examine Marxism as if it were the best idea in social organization to date instead of the colossal failure that it mutated into in the hands of Stalin and his ilk. It’s difficult to take anyone seriously who’s still willing to consider what I like to call “the tyranny of the bottom” as a valid governmental system.

Thankfully, and just as one begins to think the book is a lost cause, the authors veer away from Marx and into a reasonably well-done analysis of the current state of global affairs vis-a-vis individual liberties and international relations. It’s certainly not the stuff of the Bush administration and, for that at least, is an interesting perspective.

Ultimately I found the authors’ linchpin argument – the idea that labor is coalescing around some sort of supra-national set of shared knowledge the authors call “The Common” – unconvincing. Yes, non-tangible labor such as software and other service industries are “hot job markets” and yes, technology is working its way into even the most banal of industries, such as agriculture. But the notion that this provides intellectual, emotional or social-class links between farmers and technologists simply isn’t the case, at least at this stage of integration (call me on that when I’m sent to Kansas to program Farmer Brown’s John Deere to harvest 100,000 acres of wheat without an operator).

The questions that Multitude tries to ask are: Are we governed in the optimal way and, if not, what would a more optima
Multitude War and Democracy