Re: <nettime> the west shifts to the left?

["keith@thememorybank.co.uk" <keith@thememorybank.co.uk>]

Alex Foti wrote:

> In an interview in La Paz published today, Toni Negri
> stated in an interview that geopolitical multilateralism
> is now a reality and that the economic axis of empire no
> longer runs on newyork-washington-hollywood but on the
> brasilia-bruxelles-calcutta(kolkata) parallel. The first part of the
> statement is undoubtedly true, but what about the second part: don't
> you find it weird to juxtapose Brazil, Europe and India?

Negri, in his desperation to be redeemed from the massive misjudgment
of his book on Empire, seems to have altogether abandoned realism
and logic. There is a wannabe association, IBSA, which stands for
India Brazil South Africa and South-South cooperation. Brasilia
and Brussels are federal capitals, but whatever else they have in
common escapes me. Kolkata has no analogous place in India on any
axis of classification, certainly not as the modern economic power
it was in the nineteenth century. The only it might have crossed his
radar screen is through Amartya Sen's recent speeches and writing.
Sen nostalgically claims that the main benefit of communist rule
there is that Kolkata is still very poor but has remarkably low
levels of violence. Not the stuff of counter-hegemony, but noteworthy
nonetheless.

KH






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