<http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/06/1317232>
The following is a dialogue with Anne DuFourmantelle from Negri's recently published "Abecedaire Politique"(Calmann-Levy 2002), and was translated by Thomas Seay.
E as in Empire
Anne DuFourmantelle: What can you tell us about the concept of Empire that you developed with Michael Hardt?
Toni Negri: Our work together has been most of all a work on linguistic clarification. Indeed, the word "Empire" might seem ambiguous. It immediately appeared in political and journalistic vocabularies and rapidly became static. Nevertheless, by "Empire" we intend something very precise: the transfer of sovereignty from Nation-states to a superior entity. This transfer has almost always been understood in terms of an "internal analogy", that is to say, as if Empire were implicitly a nation-state the size of the world. Along with this simplification, there is the widely held notion that Empire corresponds to the United States. Contrary to this, we emphasize the fact that the large-scale transfers which are occurring in the military, monetary, cultural, political and linguistic spheres cannot be reduced to some internal analogy; it comes down to the fact that the structure of Empire is radically different from that of nation-states. The process which ushered in Empire is in fact founded on contradictory phenomena: It is founded on the struggles that the working classes waged against capital which made the reproduction of the capitalist system impossible at the national level; It is also founded on the anti-colonial wars and Vietnam which gave rise to a massive anti-imperialist upsurge that shook capital to the core; finally, it is founded on the crisis of the socialist countries. The socialist management of capital did not succeed in developing in face of burgeoning demands for freedom. The cumulative effect of these processes brought about disequilibrium on a world level and Empire came into being amidst multiple extremely violent conflicts. The imperial process that we describe is therefore contradictory at once by its origins and by its development. Today, we have a world-governance that attempts to establish forms of government that can permeate the biopolitical fabric of the entire global citizenry. What interested us in writing this book was to begin to define the areas of struggle and counter-power within Empire. What this means first of all is to put forward some basic demands which correspond to the new context. In particular I have in mind three of these. Respond to the present economic globalization by calling for rights as citizens of the world. In particular the right to free movement, the right to a minimum salary (a citizenship income), the right to re-appropriation, which is to say, recognition of the fact that production belongs to the multitude.
First point: the workforce no longer has borders. We must begin to think as citizens of the world. People should be able to go where they want, they are citizens; they should be able to vote there where they are, there where they work. Free movement has 'til now been entirely managed by capital, because it needs cheap labor, and a mobile workforce was essential to the production of value. We demand that this free movement become a right of the global citizen.
Second point: a minimum income. A system for distributing wealth that treats reproduction as necessary. This includes not only the reproduction of the workforce but also the reproduction of humanity. Concretely this means that in as much as social cooperation and affect make up an integral part of value production (think of the role of women in society, as Deleuze said, "there is a future-woman of work"), we call for the participation of all in the production of social capital be remunerated. This means that everybody should have equal access to health care, knowledge and material wellbeing. The world can no longer be split into rich and poor, between productive and unproductive, because production has thoroughly merged with life itself, making no division between the two possible. A guaranteed salary, a citizenship salary, is at once an end to the mirage of welfare policies and laws over the poor -- which serve only to re-enforce divisions -- and the end of poverty. Production has become entirely biopolitical and so life should be remunerated.
Last point: as life has become the motor of production, we ask that the multitude -- that is to say, world citizens -- be permitted to re-appropriate life. For example, there should be no more copyright. Why shouldn't knowledge, which is today the main form of production, be accessible by all?
AF: Is this the end of the idea of the author?
TN: It's the end of the idea of property. While the idea of the end of material property seems more complicated, the idea of the end of immaterial property and production seems much more simple. Nonetheless, it's the same issue.
AF: These are issues that arise with the Internet and Napster.
TN: It's not only about the Internet. The Internet is simply the most visible tip of the iceberg. But nearly all production nowadays is carried on through networks of cooperation and exchange. Production cannot be, at once, based on the circulation of knowledge and at the same time set limits on access to that knowledge. And when I say cooperation, I mean life. Nowadays, work and life, production and reproduction are entirely inter-mixed. Put another way, the world's material wealth is passed on through various forms of collaboration and cooperation, not just intellectual labor: contacts, relations, exchanges, desires have become productive. Production is life itself. It is only in this way that all that lives enters into the circuits of production. Forms of monetary exchange, forms of command, the defense of property become as a result more and more parasitic. Thirty years ago, they could be denounced in the name of exploitation. Today it is the paradigmatic shift of production that demands their suppression. It's a splendid paradox: capitalism has entered a new phase, and it is capital itself that will bring about the promises we made in the 70s but were unable to keep. I speak of it as a defeat but that's not right: the metamorphosis of capital is completely the result of those struggles.
AF: Yet at the same time, to get back to the example of Napster, they lost.
TN: For now they have lost, but wait and see what will happen in the coming years.
AF: Isn't there always an attempt to re-establish property at the center of the debate even when there is a feeling that the movement is going in another direction?
TN: Yes. I'm not sure that can go on much longer. There was a time when access to the Bible was the exclusive right of the Church: free access to the Bible was considered dangerous by the authorities. Today the problem emerges with regard to knowledge in general, in regards to language. Language has become the foundation of the living. Everything has become linguistic and biopolitical. And the powers-that-be consider dangerous whatever the poor -- meaning those whose only wealth is their life -- take hold of.
AF: Haven't politics always been biopolitical?
TN: I believe we should be clear on the concept of biopolitics. "Biopolitics" means precisely the intertwining of life and power. The fact that power has chosen to engrave itself on life is not new. What Foucault calls, "biopower", arrives on the scene, according to him, at the end of the 18th century. But resistance to biopower exists. To say that life resists means that life affirms its potential. By this we intend that life affirms its capabilities to create, invent, produce and subjectify. This is what we mean by biopolitics: life's resistance to power, resistance to that very power which permeates it. From this point of view, the history of philosophy is, except for rare exceptions, on the side of biopower.