Postface
to the complete text of the journal Futur Antérieur (1989-98)
as
published on the Multitudes website
by
Toni Negri
translated
by Ed Emery
[On
4 November 2003 the following text was published in Italian and French on the Multitudes
website, as a preface to the e-published archive of the journal Futur
Antérieur. The original text of this article can be found at http://multitudes.samizdat.net/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=396.]
What
was Futur Antérieur? A major undertaking, ten years of hard work every
week in order to produce four issues per year, along with occasional
supplements. An expansive undertaking.
An expansivity that was not only quantitative but also qualitative. A
good journal is like an octopus, continually reaching out and pulling in the
theoretical and historical happenings in the environment in which it lives.
This journal had a soul – a passionate soul which tried to absorb everything in
the world around it which offered theoretical interest, a political choice, an
ethical dimension, or simply a joy of life. The soul of a journal is its
radical determination to give meaning to everything it touches, to build it
into a theoretical tendency, to embrace it within a mechanism of practical
activity. Futur Antérieur definitely had a soul. Or rather, many souls.
In what follows I shall identify some of them – but identifying these souls
does not mean that they can be pinned down. They were in movement, they were
multitude; the alliances within the journal were always in flux, always in a
process of continual renewal. A conjuncture which changed, which re-oriented
desire.
The
journal was born out of the emotion of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989.
The question which the founding group posed for themselves was: how to
reconstruct – not simply how to ‘refound’ – an experience of communism. All the
founders of Futur Antérieur came out of the experience of ’68 – some
from the French experience, some from the Italian. For the French the post-’68
experience had been political and theoretical, within the communist and
Troskyist organisations, within the universities and within the organisations
of the far Left. For the Italians – almost all of them political exiles in
France – the problems posed in establishing the journal were posed in a
continuity with the constructive activity of critical thought and revolutionary
activity of the 1970s. As we know, the French ’68 was short, whereas the
Italian ’68 was long and lasted for at least ten years. The former was an
event, the latter a history. Now we found ourselves together, with different
experiences but with a common need: how to build a new perspective for radical
transformation of the world while at the same time maintaining a continuity
with our hopes for communism.
As
I said, the journal was born out of the wave of emotion that followed the fall
of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It’s worth noting that all of us who were involved
in the founding of the journal drank champagne on the night when the Wall came
down. What was showing itself there was a betrayal of socialism: on the one
hand Gorbachev’s attempt – to democratise a regime now completely detached from
its revolutionary origins – had reached the end of the road. The
communist parties of Europe were converting to social democracy at a rate
proportional to the extent of the Stalinism of which they had been the bearers:
those which had been most Stalinist now became the most social-democratic. In
this conjuncture what was important was
to intervene, to break, to reverse the tendency: theory had to be
re-invented, recognising that, while socialism was dead, communism was
possible, and that, if political mediation had run out of possibilities, the
common constitution of the social was at hand. So in that conjuncture, the
conjuncture that coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall, theory re-affirmed
not a continuity of ideology, but a continuity of struggles. Socialism had been
defeated in the conjuncture, but it left us a heritage of organisation, of
struggles, of a biopolitical sense of the existing world, which could – to the
extent that we were able to detach ourselves from it – be proposed as the basis
for a reappropriation and/or a construction of new political means of
transformation.
Later
the journal was to live the experience of another major conjuncture. It
analysed and documented the process of constitution of struggles, from those of
the immigrants in the mid-1980s, to the upsurge of the social proletariat of
Paris against the first attempts at privatisation by the city council. The
great importance of this period of movement was that, on the one hand, it
opened a window on the conjuncture that was about to begin, towards the
problems that were to characterise the global era of neo-liberalism; on the
other, it expressed and highlighted the new characteristics of living labour.
The analysis of the conjuncture was profoundly intertwined with theoretical
analysis, so that, beginning with the crisis which intensified between the
1980s and the 1990s, it was able to make statements about the new nature of
productive labour. This was the great moment of the history of Futur
antérieur. In fact it was through the analysis of the struggles (and
certainly not only through sharpening our critique of ideology) that the
discovery of what was new in value and in living labour became central to our
political analysis.
Today
we live in post-modernity. A postmodern analysis of the real does not mean
simply analysing what is happening around us in terms of evanescence and global
alienation; it also (and above all) means identifying, in what is happening
around us, a productive matrix which reveals, with the new nature of labour,
the evanescence, the mobility, the precarious existence of the ontological
experience of postmodernism. The struggles of 1995-6 were the place in which
the new capitalist mode of production (postmodern, precisely) appeared and
simultaneously went into crisis. Futur antérieur charted this process,
and was able to describe it in ways that were original and powerful.
In Futur
antérieur, our attention to the cultural and political genesis of
postmodernity was accompanied by an analysis of the subjects located within the
changing nature of labour in the regimes of postmodernity. Immaterial labour,
precarious labour, the subsumption of affective labour within and beneath the
productive potential of capitalism, the transformation of social cooperation
into a fundamental element of value creation – all this became a crucial
element of research and theoretical analysis. When these considerations were
added to our detailed analyses of struggles, and were articulated with the
definition of tendencies, then we were within a change of paradigm: from
modernity to postmodernity, from Fordism to postfordism. In short, precisely at
that point where the analysis of the present opens the way to an analysis of
the future.
In Futur
antérieur all this was widely understood and jointly discussed. Furthermore,
the discussions about class struggle went hand in hand with a deep reappraisal
of the latest themes in French philosophy. Once, in the nineteenth century
(says Marx), there was a relation between Germany and France: in Germany
metaphysical thought ruled the roost, and this way of thinking about
transformation was picked up by the struggles of the workers and the
proletariat in France. Futur antérieur represented a similar
relationship, but this time between France and Italy in the late twentieth century:
now it was Italy which came across as the place of struggles, and France which
came across as the place for theory. In Futur antérieur Italian
workerism proved itself on the terrain of a philosophy which was innovative in
European terms and transformed the socialist thinking of totality into a
communist thinking of difference. It was here, in this continuity and in this
synthesis, that we saw the powerful emergence of the theme of precarious
labour, and that of citizen income [reddito di cittadinanza]; it was
here that – albeit in an atmosphere of major polemic – that new lines began to
develop for the development and refoundation of a postsocialist programme.
What
more can I say? Both in the themes that it put forward and in the polemics
which enlivened the editorial committee, the journal lived, so to speak, on the
outer edge of the possibility of still thinking in terms of socialism, and of
the desire to invent communism. The journal lived in a space between a
distancing from of socialism, and communist excess.
Before
ending I should obviously say something about the limitations in the discourse
of Futur antérieur. It was characterised by a certain eclecticism, on a
philosophical terrain located between Althusserianism and Foucauldianism,
between critique of socialism and traditions of communism, between analysis of
struggles and various openings in the critique of ideology. This led to a
rather contradictory atmosphere, perhaps contradictory in a positive sense, but
often aleatory, sometimes unsure of itself and groping in the dark. The journal
was postmodern without wanting to be so, as a result of the internal polemics
and the capacity which its editors had, of [pulling] the debate towards
a common point, a shared emotion, a utopian projectuality, rather than
dissipating the complexity, the radicality and sometimes the contradictoriness
of that experience into destructive polemic. However, it is true to say that
there was a degree of theoretical eclecticism and a very dispersive
philosophical discourse. Another limitation was that the themes of feminism
were touched on but not assimilated, even though – for the first time – they
were assuming a central role in the elaboration of a communist discourse.
Certainly, Futur antérieur did publish in France the writings of Judith
Butler, Donna Haraway and many other feminists. The politicised feminist
discourse which concluded in the simple demand for equality of rights was systematically attacked and
demolished. On the other hand the thematic of female difference found in Futur
antérieur a place for its diffusion and a precise appreciation of its value
as a political programme. However, that said, Futur antérieur was not
capable of embarking on a progressive mechanism of absorption of the
theoretical and practical experience of feminism into the themes of
postmodernity. This was a big limitation, and was not much lessened by our
intellectual and political curiosity.
You,
dear readers, cannot imagine the level of polemic, not to mention psychological
and physical tension, around the editorial table at Futur antérieur. It
was a miracle that this group of comrades was able to work together, coming as
they did from the experiences of French Trotskyism post-’68 and the Italian
workerism of the 1960s. But they were able to work together, and the
results were excellent. The editorial board of Futur antérieur worked by
asking questions and by asking questions of each other. A combined operation of
research and theory, conjunctural interventions and attempts at the elaboration
of programmes. Futur antérieur broke with the literary and journalistic
traditions of the labour movement and in a strange but extremely positive
manner renewed many things in the project of communism.
Toni
Negri,
September 2003