"The world is turned upside down - definitively. We understand in the crisis, better than we could understand in the struggle, how we ourselves have constructed the prison cages of power that surround our existence, leaving them in the hands of the parasitic existence of a bourgeoisie without productivity...The notion of power advanced by the perspective of nonviolent action is very ambiguous. The rejection of violence on which it is based is too easily confused with a rejection of power 'tout court'. In fact, nonviolent actions gain their force primarily through eliciting a moral outrage in sympathy with the powerless, and thus focus on the media representation of their victimization. Nonviolent protestors, who are not usually victims themselves, put themselves in the position to be victimized in order to represent the unjust plight of the powerless...The forms of political contestation channeled through all the institutions of civil society involved the legitimation of violence in some form or other. With the withering of civil society, however, the structures that legitimated violent political contestation have equally withered, so that it appears that no contestational violence can be legitimated. The horizon of contestational practice appears as barren between the two poles, with nonviolent action on one side and terrorism on the other. There seems to be nowhere left for us to stand between these two unacceptable positions.
"Clearly, the terms of political practice and violence must be rethought so that we can move to a different plane with richer possibilities. The critique of violence should not be conceived as an operation that delimits from the outset the boundaries of violence in our life or in our world, but rather as an effort to discern from an internal perspective the differentiations within violence and within the exercise of power...The concept of the postmodern State with respect to social production can be defined as the production of commodities through command...The postmodern State poses its interests in social production as an external observer, only concerned with the fact that autonomous social production reproduces (or is forced to reproduce) the conditions of command, or rather the conditions of the reproduction of the State and capital as purely autonomous powers of disposition over society...Never before has the category of "production of commodities through command" found a more perfect realization.
"Through global command the international order reproduces both the organization of production and the division of labor on an international scale. Never before has the process been juridically regulated, becoming an instrument of the police, and an administrative organ...the new form of the postmodern State, or rather the new formal constitution of the material separation between State and society, appears as a concentration of these repressive developments, but also as the site of new possibilities. This, in fact, is where everything is born and where everything returns: the site of social and class struggle, the site where the modern State found its means of development and encountered its crisis, and the site of the conflict between different subjects on the fundamental decisions about authority, the division of labor and the distribution of wealth...How can we affirm freedom when nothing above it can impose an order on it?
"When the subjects have become autonomous producers of wealth, knowledge, and cooperation, without the need of external command, when they organize production itself and social reproduction, there is no reason for an overarching, sovereign power external to their own power. There is no reason for something that hinders their construction or that commands the meaning of the constitutive power of the new subjects. In this situation the institutional processes that organize the life of the multitude can only be internal to the life of the multitude itself. Constituent power is the only form in which democracy can be understood so as not be, in its very definition, negated.
"We are not proposing utopia. Our analysis and our research, like the political will that animates them, are conscious that this definition of democracy as constituent process is a path that must be traveled, and that the multitude of subjects must construct its institutionality. We also know that the liberation of constituent power, and therefore the real constructive processes of democracy, go hand in hand with the destructuring of constituted power, that is, the actual scaffolding of the constitutional, social, and economic enslavement of the multitude...
"A productive exodus characterizes the constituent process of the multitude: the institutional construction and constitution of cooperation are pursued independent of from the process of the extinction of constituted power. These two lines move on the horizon of the world as an ungraspable alterity. There will nonetheless be a moment in which the two independent processes will come to confront one another, because there will be a moment in which the implosion of the postmodern State into the vacuousness of its ontological referent will threaten the entire world with a moment of destruction and death."