posted by Uncle Fluffy on Friday January 04, @07:02PM from the star-fuckers-anonymous dept. hydrarchist writes: "
This translation is the work of Ed Emery.
The following is a contribution by Toni Negri to a meeting in 2001 at the Literature Faculty of the La Sapienza university, organised by the group Laboratorio Sapienza Pirata. The Italian text was circulated on the Multitudes-Infos discussion list. I have translated it in order to bring it to a wider audience.
Globalisation.... Multitude etc.
"I feel uncomfortable when people talk about the birth of the globalised world simply as a kind of effect, a given, an expansion of the empire that was left [after the disappearance of the USSR].
"Globalisation, which really begins to lift off in 1989, doesn't happen simply by the outward spreading of one empire when another empire disappears. It is born of far deeper roots. Globalisation is the point of confluence of working class and proletarian struggles which could no longer be regulated within the confines of the nation State. The dynamic which consisted of struggles - creation of inflation - balancing of state budgets - pressure on welfare - breaking of the material elements of the bourgeois constitution, led gradually to two things: first, a theory of the limits of democracy (and strangely here we find that same Huntington who wrote about the "clash" of civilisations in a document of the Trilateral Commission back in the 1970s), and then a powerful push towards going beyond the nation State.
"On the other hand the nation State was more than just the capacity to contain struggles and regulate them domestically. The nation State was also the imperialist State, the colonialist State. Here too, in the second half of the twentieth century we have the definitive end of the colonial process, the birth of a new world (which came to be know as the "Third" World), in which the drive for freedom and pressures on the wage explode the mechanism which had controlled the prices of raw materials. Precisely in the name of this liberation, we begin to see these huge pressures of labour-power on everything, at the global level. Not to mention the crisis of the Soviet Union - which happens at the precise moment when it became necessary to shift from the Fordist mode of production to the post-Fordist mode of production: a transition which is impossible when the worker has no freedoms. This extremely powerful movement is linked to the development of science, of public education within the socialist countries, where there is a necessity of inserting into this new world. A new world in which, precisely, the nature of labour-power and of the productive processes is changing.
"At its birth, therefore, globalisation is an extremely positive element. It is a sign of freedom, a sign of the strength of the historical processes which are blowing apart the hellish cage which is the nation State. The nation State, which for centuries has sent people to be killed in the most stupid wars, in the madness of the trenches. The nation State, whose ideology leads inevitably to the gages of Auschwitz. Faced with the end of the nation State, and the liberation of the proletarian forces of the Third World, we found this remarkable moment of transition: globalisation. Finally! Obviously the fact of claiming this transition does not mean that capital has been defeated. Capital takes this transition on board, reorganises itself at that level, and it is here that the problem of Empire is born. Note carefully - the birth of Empire is something different from the pure and simple expansion of the USA as a nation State. The Americans are fully present in this whole story, particularly in the first phase, but they are present far more as a centre and apex of world capital that as a state-based force. It is collective capital which is involved in the early phases of the organisation of this world. Between the 1980s and 1990s new forms of government begin to be sought. The United Nations is no use here, because within the UN you have the paradox of the idea of world democracy: at the world level "one man one vote" is seen as a ridiculous notion. It would mean, as some theorists have jokingly observed, giving the imperial majority to China. Therefore the problem of organisation is resolved by the invention of a different form of sovereignty.
"Sovereignty, which the nation States prove incapable of organising in a different manner, is increasingly transferred towards a set of nascent institutions, which gradually take shape, and gradually come to establish themselves at the world level: the Group of 8 (G8), the International Monetary Fund, etc. They are basically organisations which were invented for the management of international Keynesianism at the end of World War II, but then became organisms of capitalist mediation, of capitalist regulation at the world level. This process obviously becomes increasingly problematic, because it shifts a series of conflicts from within individual countries onto the world stage. During the 1980s and 1990s we saw a recomposition of struggles on the world stage which was absolutely remarkable. There was a whole series of important struggles (from Tienanmen to South Korea, from Indonesia to Los Angeles, from Chiapas to the struggles in Paris in 1995) which had identified world capitalist power as their adversary. However these were struggles in isolation. They did not constitute a cycle, they failed to achieve that mass thrust which only united struggles speaking the same language are able to generate.
"All that was created later, with the movement in Seattle, which was able to build opposition to imperial power at the same moment as that power was being created. And therefore we saw a cycle of struggles which, while still superficial and full of limitations, was seen by international capitalist public opinion as a movement which was extremely dangerous to the process of formation of Empire. At this point a decision was required, as to what to do. One thing which we should avoid is to consider the American nation as a new imperialist State. It is not simply that! That element is also present, but the unity of the capitalist class today is absolutely fundamental. There is no longer the possibility of turning to the nation State as a way of opposing America as the nation. The elites of the old nation States have been massively coopted to the upper reaches of the Empire.
"A large part of US discussions in the second half of the 1990s on the handling of wars in the US are around the possibility that capitalist capacity might intervene directly and powerfully in the reorganisation of Empire and the new world order, and initiate an acceleration of that process. Hence the whole issue of Star Wars defence systems, which becomes a big mediation in relation to the need to determine the new order. As in the days of Byzantium there is an attempt to create a protected centre (the USA and the western countries) in which the accumulation of power is demonstrated. All this - a last-ditch attempt to exclude the rest of the world - explodes on 11 September. And therefore it is war. But what sort of war? How can you make a war when there is no "outside"? So now we have war as "police" action. The American science of war was developing on the one hand around Star Wars, and on the other around the transformation of armies into rapid intervention forces with the ability to move instantaneously to any part of the world.
"The American army had to become an army of marines. Now what we face is an accumulation of all the technological, diplomatic, economic, financial and police instruments necessary for the organisation of this global world. A global world where, up until now, action by "big government" had seemed to be a thing of the past. They used to say: "big government is over", but now they say "big government is back". An overall function of government process, of "governance", in other words of continuous administrative action which transcends within itself all preceding giuridical fixed points. A dynamic process confuses the definition of rules and the guarantee of rules, which turns armies into the juridical instrument, the constitutive instrument. That is what is happening.
"Today we are seeing the maturation of a process which already a few years ago could have been broadly foreseen. Obviously nobody could have foreseen the immediate causes of this process, but it was already fairly clear that the process would turn out like this, because it followed the functional rules of exploitation at the global level. What was required was to invent a model that was as effective as the nation States had been, and as the international law of treaties had been. Other instruments needed to be invented. If one looks at the techniques of constitutional reorganisation which are taking place now in order to deal with this great crisis, it is obvious that they have to be resisted. But how to resist? Where to resist? The answer is to resist from the point of view of the new world society of the workers, from the point of view of mobility. They will try to block labour-power in its movements, but nobody will succeed in this. We have to resist the new hierarchies which will be imposed, we have to explode them. But is there really still the possibility of struggling in a world made like this, or would it not perhaps be worth deserting, in every sense? Desert with knowledge, desert in the army, desert in intellectual labour-power. That is what should be our starting point. Friends of mine are saying: "against the art of war, the art of desertion".
"Maintaining a state based on fear, and forming it in Hobbesian terms, as Ferrajoli was saying, will be very difficult for them. But it will be very difficult only to the extent that we no longer creates ourselves as "people" but remain as "multitude". It is an intelligent multitude, which has reappropriated labour to itself and which no longer has need of capital. We can no longer become "the people" [popolo]. People coincides with sovereignty, which no longer makes sense at the level of globalisation.
[...]
"Desertion or conflict? I don't see the problem in terms of alternatives. This new form of global sovereignty brings with it an investment of modes of production, and above all of reproduction of life and of society. It is for that reason that we insist on calling imperial power biopower, and we define the power of life and labour as a fabric of biopolitics. Labour [work, lavoro] has now become a social fabric, in which life, education and training, waged labour, communication, social cooperation are all subject to exploitation. It is over this global exploitation of life that biopower is exercised. It is here that we find ourselves faced with the choice of desertion, or better, of exodus. There is no longer the possibility of classic sabotage, or of a Luddite refusal, because we are right inside it. Nowadays workers carry their instruments of labour inside their own heads - so how is one to refuse work, or sabotage work? Should one commit suicide? Work is our dignity.
"The refusal of work was imaginable in a Fordist society, but today it becomes increasingly less thinkable. There is the refusal of command over work, but that is quite another thing. When we talk about exodus, we are trying successfully to construct new forms of life. This type of capitalist society will become violently institutionalised through constituent mechanisms of war. We don't want any more of it! We can't go and demonstrate against the G-8 saying "another world is possible" and then not practise, in practical terms, an exodus. An exodus which will inevitably be conflictual, because they will come and try and force you to obey. But we have to pose the question in these terms. I understand the very fine constituent, juridical, enlightenment idealism of Ferrajoli. But I understand it only on the basis of this radicality of choices. If you force me into a reinventing democracy for myself, I won't go along with that. I have had enough of a democracy which fitted perfectly with capitalism. Today it no longer fits, because power cannot be reproduced globally in the same form and according to the same criteria of profit which operated at the national level, and therefore they proceed to war. A war which has its effect on the everyday. The parable of biological warfare is a terrible parable, a metaphor of what Power is becoming. It is on this terrain that we ought to be talking about the Empire.
"Hardt and I have perhaps used a method which is a bit mechanistic in translating the workerist (operaista) schema to the international level, but what was satisfying was to find the whole of post-colonial literature aligned with our position. The whole of the great Indian school functions in these terms!
"The concept of multitude. From the scientific point of view it is still very young as a concept. We are launching it in order to see if it works. But when, in defining the new proletariat, we speak of multitude, we are speaking of a plurality of subjects, of a movement in which cooperating singularities are at work. There is an absolutely huge difference with the concept of class. The multitude works, is completely exploited, but it puts itself together through the Net, through connections, through cooperation and language. The multitude has a multipicity which is productive and constituent, all elements which can also be referred back to classical Marxist categories: to the modification of labour-power within real subsumption, in the passage of general intellect into production. The concept of multitude is therefore used here as an instrument. But what might its political relevance be? On this terrain I think that we are living through an enormous primitive accumulation at the world level. To give an image of what is happening from the point of view of subjectivity, the best that we have is an image taken from Lucretian primitive materialism: there is a great movement of particles, atoms, singularities, which are putting themselves together and building here and there. It is clear that this new flesh of the proletariat has to become body, and that it can become body only on the basis of a theos ["god"], on the basis of a self-organisation which declares that it will have nothing more to do with democracy, and also with socialism - in other words with the forms of democratic and socialist management of capital.
"The general situation in which we find ourselves is not at all pleasant. It seems to me that the war into which we are entering is far more similar to the Thirty Years War, with its massacres - a kind of state of nature. This engine of constitution which Empire is assuming and which it calls war is producing catastrophes."
Ends
[Trans note: This text may or may not have been transcribed from a live recording of the event. I do not know. It was also translated on the back of a bus, so there may be translation infelicities. For which je m'excuse en avance.]"