Speech at the European Social Forum, Paris, November 2003
by Toni Negri
translated by Ed Emery
[On
Thursday 20 November 2003 the Global Radio–Padova website published the text of
Toni Negri’s speech at the European Social Forum in Paris. The original Italian
text can be found on their website at www.globalmagazine.org.]
“I
am Italian, so I shall speak in Italian – particularly because I too would like
to begin by remembering with sympathy and with much emotion the Italians who
have died in Iraq in recent days. Italians have not been used to having
war-dead, not since fascism sent many of our friends and relations into the
monstrous adventures of the Second World War. The last thing we needed was for
a democratic regime to overturn the very terms of the Italian constitution by
sending poor wretches to die in a war which the vast majority of Italians do
not understand the reasons for, and which they oppose.
As
our parents’ generation said, expressing their anti-fascism: damn those who
sent our brothers to war during the world war, so we too say damn those who
sent these men to die in Iraq today: damn them, damn them, damn them…
It
should be said that all this has brought about a further terrible split between
the peace movement and all those in Italy who have supported this war. Among
the latter I include a sizeable proportion of the Left, because just as we must
never forget that a section of the Italian Left fully supported the war in
Kosovo, so too we cannot forget that a large part of the Italian Left was
willing to vote (after a period of laborious abstention) for the renewed
posting of Italian troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
These
are things which we cannot forget, and it is only on the basis of this non-forgetting
that we can reconstruct a Left in Italy – and I say “reconstruct a Left”
because I think that the problem of global war is not simply the problem of
struggling against this war, and struggling against all the imperialist and
neo-colonial leftovers that are going around in the world; it also means
arriving at an understanding of what is a new moment in the general political
behaviours of capital in the world of globalisation.
War
as it is presented to us today is not simply an attempt by certain US elites to
get their hands on oil (although it is certainly also that); war is not simpy
an operation of intervening in the situation in the Middle East in order to
make possible further political operations (although it is certainly also
that). War as it has been invented, applied and developed today is a
constituent war. A “constituent war” means that the form of war is no longer
simply the legitimation of power. War becomes the external and internal form
through which all the operations of power, the organisation of power at the
global level, are being developed.
War
is something which has to do with all the action of power, of worldwide power,
of global power, and this is the form in which we have to fight against this
war.
We
must oppose this war, understanding that within it, within its very form, it is
a constituent war, a biopolitical war which affects the entirety of the
ordering of life, of the production and reproduction of life. This war is a war
which saw itself as a policing war, which sought to transform the intervention
of the US armed forces into a ductile, flexible capacity for intervening easily
and quickly in all parts of the world.
It
was a war which sought to present itself as no longer a war between states and other
states, but a war against a public enemy, a war against an internal reality
which progressively came to be defined as dangerous. In short, a war which
involved the social relation in the fullest sense of the term.
What
Ignacio Ramonet was saying at the start [of this meeting] about, precisely, the
superimposition of economic war, social war and military war is perfectly
correct. These are things which form a whole, and they form a whole because
there is a constituent organisational project running through this mode of
making war. This is no longer the old imperialist war which sets out to expand
the powers of single nations; rather it is a war in the name of global capital.
It is a war that moves as global organisation, and this is what we need to understand
today. I’m thinking of what we have in Italy, with evocations of patriotism, of
the nation, of what are supposed to be the great traditional values of Italian
culture. These values are no longer our values – these values of patriotism and
the nation were never values for the true communist tradition, nor are they
today, and neither will they be in the future, ever…
We
are truly and fundamentally internationalists, but we can only be
internationalist to the extent that, and when, we understand that today we have
this empire in the process of formation, and that it is against its military
power – as well as its economic, ideological and political power – that we have
to fight.
We
must fight against this fundamental unity [of factors], and obviously this is
the next transition that we have to make.
What
does it mean, to make this transition? It means that against this war – which
is foundational, and constitutive – we must oppose political positions, we must
oppose actions, and it is clear that peace as a value is not a “take it or
leave it” thing.
Peace
has become a value which is absolutely fundamental in the entirety of our
actions: our active disobedience is a disobedience which wants to pose itself
truly in terms of peace, a disobedience which is active and if possible
non-violent: I say “if possible non-violent” because in our struggle for
democracy we cannot re-enact the totalitarian, violent character of capitalist
power.
We
really do have to break the homology of a struggle for power which re-enacts
the characteristics of power; we absolutely must move by reconquering the terms
of peace as a foundational and constitutive element in itself: herein is a
truly alternative constitution of our perspective.
Naturally
we know perfectly well that if it had not been for the plagues in Egypt Moses
would never have been able to make the exodus from the country where his people
had been kept in slavery. We know perfectly well that if it had not been for
the Aaron’s rearguard they probably would not have succeeded in opening up the
Red Sea. Therefore we know that it is necessary to resist, and that our
resistance is not always “nice”. But we also know that our strength and our
capacity for aggregating, for pulling things together, is achieved first and foremost
via an active and non-violent disobedience, and this really must be an element
that we take upon ourselves. And I believe that when we launch, from this
impressive meeting, a continuing battle against the occupation by the
capitalists in Iraq, against everything that has happened, and against war in
general, we must be sure to keep this form present.
If
it is true that capitalist development today uses war in order to organise the
world –and thus to hierarchise it, operate selection in it, and practise
inclusion/exclusion, as it is attempting to do
– then we must obviously transform our struggle for peace into a social
struggle: it is not possible to separate the struggle for peace from the social
struggle, and that brings us back to the basic problem, which is that of how to
reconstruct a Left, a Left which is capable of being pacifist, but which at the
same time knows how to put forward elements “in common” – putting forward the
big values that really are reconstructive of a democratic society in which
democracy is not a democracy of the few, but a democracy of all, and for all.
So,
in my opinion these are the feelings and – in the view of many comrades in
Italy – also the guiding lines of our action and our thinking. Thank you.”
Ends