|
|
|
In the spires of the Empire: a lesson by Toni Negri
by Anna Battista
"He's in the foyer, talking to a journalist," a guy who's just arrived
excitedly whispers to his friend sitting next to me, he smiles,
underlining, "He's being interviewed, you know," as if, before entering the
room, he himself had been the witness of a very private conversation. Then
guy sits down among the rest of the audience of the Michetti Theatre in
Pescara, Italy. Finally the man we're all waiting for gets into the theatre
room from the main entrance, surreptitiously passing near the lateral
stalls, as if he didn't want to be noticed. I can hear a lady behind me
softly remarking to a friend, "He looks older…well, after what he went
through…" Actually, so many dramatic events marked Toni Negri's life, but
tonight all those years of suffering are lost in the folds of time, finally
put behind his back, aeons away, and he's not even feeling any resentment
towards anybody, because as he will state later tonight, "Resentment is the
worst quality of a free man". Besides, Toni Negri cannot linger about his
past tonight, he is here to talk about his latest book, co-written with
Professor Michael Hardt, Empire.
A Step Into The Past.
In the '60s, Antonio Negri is teaching State Theory at the University of
Padua, in Italy. His works are mainly centred on themes like labour theory
and work. It is during these years that he also joins the Marxist journal
Quaderni Rossi and starts taking part in the Potere Operaio (Worker
Power) group. When the latter splits up, Negri moves with another group,
Autonomia Organizzata (Organized Autonomy). We are in the '70s by now, what
are usually called in Italy "gli anni di piombo" ("the years of lead"), an
expression that well defines the violence that spawned terrorist groups
like the Red Brigades. On 7th April 1979, Negri is arrested in Milan: he is
accused of being the head of various terrorist organisations. Four years
will pass, years in which Negri will be moved from one prison to another
and will also be accused of being the organiser of the murder of politician
Aldo Moro. In 1983, when Negri's trial takes place the accusation of having
been part of terrorist organisations is dropped and he is basically
condemned on the substance of his writings. On 25th and 26th June of the
same year, Negri runs as candidate for the Radical Party and, after
obtaining parliamentary immunity, leaves prison. Months pass and the
Chamber of Deputies finally requests to withdraw parliamentary immunity
from Negri. In September 1983, instead of going back to prison, Negri
escapes to France. Here he spends fourteen years, teaching political
science at the Université de Paris VIII (Saint Denis), studying and
writing. In 1997, Negri decides to come back to Italy, where he enters
Rebibbia prison in Rome to serve his sentence. Thousands of articles are
published on international newspapers about Negri's case. Even Amnesty
International studies his case and the trials that followed, what are
considered unjust trials.
A Step Into The Future.
Marx Beyond Marx (Pluto Press, 1991), The Savage Anomaly (1991),
Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (1999; both
published by the University of Minnesota Press) are listed among Antonio
Negri's most studied works, but there is one essay which is at present
considered as being the best one. Empire (published by Harvard University
Press) was written before Naomi Klein's No Logo, actually it was
practically finished quite a few years ago, exactly at the end of June
1997, before Negri came back to Italy to be arrested: on the day before 1st
July 1997, the last page of the book was written, the page in which the
legend of Saint Francis of Assisi is mentioned. Nowadays, the authors
state, we find ourselves in the same situation St. Francis was in, divided
between the joy of being alive and the misery created by power. And yet,
though the book was finished five years ago, it deals with something, an
evolutionary process, which is happening right now.
Negri and Hardt, who previously published together the volume Labor of Dionysus (1994,
University of Minnesota Press), theorise in the new volume the death of the
nation state and the rising of a new Empire, the result of the various
capitalistic processes occurred throughout history. The book, divided in
four parts, tackles issues such as the new Empire, the new concept of
labour and multitude, immigration, wars and the final destruction of the
Empire. Hardt and Negri do not tend to identify the Empire with a single
nation such as the United States, but they claim that the proper Empire is
a sort of place without boundaries, which is forming right now, through a
thick network of new laws and regulations. Though it is still forming, the
new power is already going through a deep crisis, analysed in the last part
of the book, in which, very optimistically, the two authors confide into
the power of the multitude to destroy the Empire.
"The book written by
Hardt and me is rather old, we finished compiling it around 1997-98," Negri
starts remembering, explaining, "The Empire forms when the nation state and
the national space reveals itself as incapable of taking proper control.
The workers' struggles in the capitalistic countries, the anti-colonial
struggles in the ex-colonial countries and the struggles for freedom in the
socialist countries, have little by little transformed the space controlled
by the modern sovereignty. As a first consequence, the capital had to
establish new wider structures to contain these groups. We must underline
one thing: there isn't yet an 'Empire', but it is getting formed through an
attempt at regulation, at creating rules. The sovereignty is taken away
from the single nations and transferred to another level, but who does
exercise it and in which limits? These are today's problems. Today we can't
say 'let's go back to the nation state to try and defend ourselves from the
attempts being made at forming the new order of the world'. The nation
state is going through a crisis. The sovereignty has three characteristics:
it can organise an army, it mints coin and it can determinate the local
culture. All these things aren't possible right now in a modern nation
state. At present only the Empire can organise a war, only the world market
can determine the possibility of minting coin and, from the cultural point
of view, a nation can't really have a cultural monopoly. In the same way,
also other wide categories, such as the international law, don't exist
anymore. The formation process of the Empire is not quiet and calm, but it
is charged with grave consequences. This is a process with incredible
implications."
Among the various consequences of the process which is
forming the Empire, Negri underlines one in particular, the concept of
labour. "Labour has become immaterial, a characteristic helped by the third
revolution which has provided the technological means that allow to develop
labour in these forms. Today, for all those ones who produce intellectual
and immaterial work, there isn't any difference between the working day and
the temporal day. Labour becomes a vital activity: it becomes the
intellectual or linguistic capability of building new values. At present,
the single persons can generate a product. Once, in the period of time that
goes from capitalism to the formation of the great industry, when people
went to work, it was the master, the owner who gave them the tools, the
instruments to work. But now things are changed: working means expressing
intellectual and linguistic abilities, so that we ourselves own the tools,
the instruments to work with. In this way, the virtues of a single person
are estimated to a higher degree and the concept of class comes to an end.
The concept of class and mass had a subordination value: it was the capital
that formed a class. Today the situation is modified. The capitalist
doesn't give me the instrument anymore, but I have the instrument to work,
because I'm a alive, because I develop an activity, because I co-operate
with the others and produce a language and the language is what determines
the production and the valorisation. The sovereignty develops, but the
intellectual strength grows. In this way the anthropologic structure is
transformed. Labour transforms the man and when labour identifies with the
man it is then that everything is modified. The attempt at exercising the
sovereignty clashes with a formidable force constituted by individuals who
are in possession of the instruments to work with."
In Empire there is also the formulation of a new concept, that of
"multitude": "With this word we intend all the single persons, all the
subjects. The multitude is a process born out of a singularity that
evidently wanted to get together and find their unity. These singularities
are, as first thing, a multiplicity. The concept of 'mass' weighs over the
concept of 'multiplicity' in the same way as the concept of 'class': the
concepts of 'mass' and 'class' don't let the creativity process emerge. If
with 'people' we indicate the whole group of people who delegate their
authority to the state, with 'multitude' we indicate the reaffirmation of
the singularities of the people. When we talk about multitude we talk about
a power opposed to the Empire. Sovereignty is a monolithic, unilateral
power that the state or the prince exercise over the others. In the
workers' struggles this kind of unilateral and fascist concept is a concept
of relation it is a dynamic relationship between the sovereign and somebody
who obeys. And this relationship determines the conditions in which the
sovereign can live. The time of the Welfare State and of the great
industries was a time in which such a relationship was evident . But given
the transformations of the political and productive web, the concept of
sovereignty is changing even more. Today the multitudes aren't an obstacle,
they are a proper limit which can't be overstepped. The limit to the word
market is the multitude."
But apart from the concepts of multitude and mass, there is another issue
Negri can't escape talking about, war: "War intervenes inside the process
of formation of the Empire as an element that undoubtedly renews the
control technique. But the definition of war has changed. Once with 'war'
we indicated 'politics', war meant making politics but with other means,
this is a definition linked with a secular Machiavellian tradition. Is war
today a continuation of politics? No, it actually stands at the foundation
of politics, it is the regulating principle of the world, it presents as
the governing element of the political reorganisation of the world market.
War now takes place against an enemy which isn't territorially defined. The
enemy is an enemy inside the Empire, a public enemy inscribed in the
imperial space. But, in modern history, when we talked about an enemy
inside the national space, we also implied that it was the police who had
to face it. The war in the Empire becomes police from a theoretical point
of view. The war is not the destructive war in which millions of men were
thrown in the trenches and set one against the other. Before 11th September
the American army system went through a reformation: it was transformed so
that the army became a sort of police force, divided in small units capable
of surviving for long periods, after having been transported in various
parts of the world, whenever and wherever they are needed. The Intelligence
and the secret services aren't anymore considered as institutions parallel
to the army, but they are integrated into the military force. War and
police do not identify one with the other, but the two concepts are getting
nearer and nearer, they are put in a relation of continuity. A low
intensity war is identified with high intensity police. We are in front of
such a situation in Israel and we were in front of such a situation in
Genoa. The enemy is a public enemy linked to the forms and to the problems
of the structures. Often the enemy is identified with the immigrants, it is
a mobile enemy."
And so Negri introduces the immigration issue, which is
also analysed in Empire: "The struggle against emigration, the attempt at
enclosing this work force that moves in such an impetuous way on a worldly
basis, is one of the most horrible examples which proves that the
relationship 'war-police' is forming. The impossibility from the side of
the Empire to control the demographic and emigrating movements becomes one
of the top priorities on the agenda of the 'war-police' relationship. In
the emigration flux we only see the huge sufferings of the emigrating
multitude and we feel compassion towards them. To feel sympathetic towards
this people is a good thing, a right thing to do, but inside these
movements we must also see the search of these population for expressing
themselves. Moving is a rebellious act, an extremely positive act. We must
consider the migrating populations as people who want to build new forms of
freedom, they are positive elements who are breaking down the enclosures."
After talking about Empire, Negri moves on, reminding the audience that
he's also the editor of the journal Posse. The name of the journal comes
from Latin, it indicates the verb "to be able to", "posse" indicates what a
body and a soul can do together, Negri and Hardt claim in Empire, "We did
three issues of the journal: the first one was called 'Vivere nell'Impero'
('Living in the Empire')," Negri explains continuing, "It was inspired by
the book Empire and it took into consideration a few thesis developed in
the book. We wanted to verify the things said in Empire on a daily basis
after Seattle. We started developing an inquiry on the job situation,
noting how the multitude works in a new way and that it lives in a
condition of territorial mobility and flexibility and works in a society
and not in the factory, creating the production through the co-operation.
We wanted to see how the Empire worked in productive situations. What is
extraordinary right now is that labour has really changed and it is coming
back to the centre of our attention as it was for Marx."
When Negri concludes his speech with the words "Once we used to say 'It is right to
rebel'. Now they prefer to say 'Another world is possible'", the audience
claps for a long minute. In Empire Hardt and Negri compare the new power
to the Roman Empire: it can indeed be divided into monarchy, aristocracy
and democracy, the basic trinity at the foundation of the ancient Empire.
The army, organisations such as NATO or the G8 nations are the monarchy
whereas the aristocracy is constituted by the multinationals. Finally the
democracy is incarnated by the various non-governmental organisations and
by the multitude. Like a million-footed body, the multitude moves against
the Empire, standing in front of the new global sovereignty ready to
subvert it and to turn it to its needs. It is difficult to predict the kind
of government which the multitude of the future may reach, we might say,
paraphrasing Leon Trotsky's Literature & Revolution, but it is easy to
hope that, like the human beings mentioned by Trotsky, the multitude will
become "immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; their bodies will become
more harmonised, their movements more rhythmic, their voice more musical.
The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human being
will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above
this ridge new peaks will rise."
Issue 9, April 2002 | next article
|
|
|
|
|
|