GLOBALISATION…
MULTITUDE… etc
by
Toni Negri
translated
by 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.]
"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.]