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
"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
"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
"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
"All that was created later, with the
movement in
"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
"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.]