BARBARIANS: the disordered insurgence
by Crisso and Odoteo
Translator’s Preface
Barbarians by Crisso
and Odoteo is a text of some importance for anarchists and anyone else
who sincerely desires the destruction of this social world of exploitation and
domination. It presents a devastating critique of a book that has become one of
the most significant theoretical influences on a major part of the so-called
anti-globalization movement, Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
When one reads these two texts together, two opposing ways of using language
are exposed. Hardt and Negri use a language that is obviously meant to conceal
at least as much as it reveals, and that should immediately tip one off to the
recuperative nature of their text. Crisso and Odoteo, on the contrary, use
direct language as sharp as a barbarian’s sword to cut through the murky web of
Hardt’s and Negri’s postmodern doublespeak to reveal the essentially
anti-revolutionary core of their perspective.
For example, Hardt and Negri
claim to be post-dialectical and post-Marxist. It merely takes a slight rip of
the veil to expose a historical determinism and a rigid dialectic of class
struggle that reflects one of the crudest versions of Marxism. Negri and Hardt,
in fact, justify the horrors of the present not merely as historically necessary
for the development of communism, but as actual reflections of the power
of the “multitude”, their historical subject.
It is particularly useful
that, as Italians, Crisso and Odoteo are familiar with the various movements
that have been influenced by Negri, as well as with recent works of his that
are not available in English. This allows them to place Empire in a
context that further exposes its recuperative significance.
Crisso and Odoteo clearly
expose the love Hardt and Negri actually have for the Empire and its methods of
homogenizing the world. This love, in fact, reaches the point of support for
the European Union. Negri recently co-edited a collection of texts by leftists
in praise of the political unification of
More frightening is Negri’s
and Hardt’s unquestioning support of the totality of technological development
– proclaimed to be expressions of the desires of “the multitude”. They go so
far as to call for the “recognition […] that there are no boundaries between
[…] the human and the machine” (Empire, p. 215) and, thus, the acceptance
of ourselves as cyborgs (see for example, Empire, p.92). For them the
project of technologizing life – i.e., biotechnology integrated with
cybernetics – is desirable and necessary, simply because it exists.
Crisso and Odoteo also
clearly expose the nature of the “subjectivity” Hardt and Negri speak of
repeatedly. This term, as the professors use it, has nothing whatsoever to do
with individual choice, will, desire or self-activity. Instead it refers to the
production of relationships which subject us to the needs of the social
institutions. This is why “the production of subjectivity” must be grounded “in
the functioning of major institutions, such as the prison, the family, the
factory, and the school” (Empire, p.195).
In fact, Hardt and Negri absolutely
reject the individual, seeing the very concept of individuality as contrary to
their project. On page 388, they tell us that “No ontology, except a
transcendent one, can relegate humanity to individuality”, and two pages later
they say, “…there is corruption as individual choice that is opposed to and
violates the fundamental community and solidarity defined by biopolitical
production”. Thus, singularity is not a trait of individuals, but of “groups
and sets of humanity”* biopolitically singularized by “the multitude” (p. 395).
And “the multitude” to which they refer repeatedly is finally defined on page
316 of their book as “the universality of free and productive practices”. To
put it more clearly: the forces of social production. The Marxist-leninist
roots of their perspective are clearly exposed. For them the subject of
liberation is precisely the productive apparatus for which we are mere cogs.
With a notion of liberation
that, in fact, means the absolute subjection of individuals to the productive
apparatus, Hardt and Negri are correct to see their path as going “through
Empire”, because their project is that of Empire. But once the barbaric
sword of Crisso and Odoteo cut through the professors’ convoluted language, it
becomes clear that those of us who desire our own liberation as individuals,
who want the freedom to create our lives on our times have a project “absolutely
other”: the total destruction of the Empire here and now.
The time of the barbarians is
at hand.
by
Crisso and Odoteo
Someone has noted that one of Marx’s
greatest tricks was that of having invented Marxism as a lingua franca*. Since ancient times it has been known that the art
of persuasion consists of being able to use speaking or writing to cause a
precise psychological effect in the one who listens or reads that goes well
beyond the contents developed in the reasoning.
The Greeks said that persuading meant to “lead minds to oneself”. Many
Marxian expressions – and, one could say, the “insidious clamor” of his prose –
have enchanted, terrorized, produced thousands of competing readings.
Expressions such as “Historically determined social conditions, extraction of
surplus value, objectively counter-revolutionary elements”, certain
journalistic techniques and the famous genitive inversions (“philosophy of
misery, misery of philosophy”): this jargon has supplied many aspiring
bureaucrats and true dictators with a reservoir of pre-made phrases with which
to justify their power. And it has supplied just as many social democrats with
a smoke-screen with which to please anyone who is satisfied that capitulation
in practice is connected to radicality in style. The important thing was and is
to assume the attitude of one who knows what he/she is talking about with
scientific precision.
Antonio Negri’s texts play the same role
today, if you will. In fact, there are two “theoretical centrals” of the thing
which journalistic newspeak describes as the anti-globalization movement:
the Le monde diplomatique collective and our Paduan professor to be
precise. The monthly publication named after the collective, the organization
of conferences and seminars, the publication of books and the creation of the
so-called movement for the Tobin tax* (Attac) – various Italian sections of which
now exist – owe their existence to the former. From the latter, who was one of
the original founders of Workers’ Power and then Workers’ Autonomy, came much
of the Italian workerist ideology and now the theory for which the White
Overalls (Tute bianche), the Disobedient (Disobbedienti) and so many other global citizens are
little soldiers. Reading any flyer from any social forum, one will
indubitably find the following expressions: civil society, multitude, movement
of movements, citizenship income, dictatorship of the market, exodus,
disobedience (civil or civic), globalization from the bottom and so on.
Likewise, having a more or less extensive history, these concepts, assembled in
various ways, constitute the present-day Cliff Notes for the alternative
recuperator and ideal reformist. One of the managers of this “ontological
factory”, one of the technicians of this “linguistic machine” is, once again,
Toni Negri.
We will
not fall into the banal error of believing that certain theories are
unilaterally influencing the movement. The theories spread insofar as they
serve specific interests and respond to specific needs. Empire by Negri and Hardt is an
exemplary book in this sense. Together with the elaborations of their
“diplomatic” French cousins, its pages offer the most intelligent version of
the left wing of capital. The groups that refer to it are the globalized
version of the old social democracy and the gaseous variants of Stalinist bureaucracy
that have replaced the rigid hierarchy of functionaries with the model of the
network (or the rhizome) in which the leader’s power seems more fluid. In
short, the communist party of the third millennium, the pacification of the
present, the counter-revolution of the future. Built on the decline of the
workers’ movement and its forms of representation, this new method of doing
politics no longer has privileged fields of intervention (like the factory or
the neighborhood) and offers a more immediate terrain than that of the old
party secretariats to the ambitions of aspiring managers: the relationship with
the mass media. This is why the parties and unions of Left pose as allies of
this new “movement” and often go in tow to its initiatives, knowing well that
beyond the piercings of whatever little leader and certain slogans from
rhetorical guerrillas, the political disobedient represent the basis
(electoral, as well) of the democratic power to come. It maintains the
Stalinist role intact, but its future is inscribed above all in its capacity to
set itself up as a force of mediation between subversive tensions and the
necessities of the social order, leading the movement into the institutional
riverbed and carrying out a function of denunciation of the elements that
escape its control.*
On the
other hand, after having progressively absorbed the social, the state managed
to suffocate all creativity under the institutional burden; when forced to
expel it again, it called this refuse civil society, decorating it with all
the ideologies of the middle class: humanitarianism, voluntary service,
environmentalism, pacifism, anti-racism, democracy. In the overflowing
passivity, consensus needs continuous injections of politics. The disobedient
politicians with their citizens serve this purpose. Indeed, for the orphans of
the working class, it is the abstract figure of the citizen that now has all
virtue. Ably playing on the meanings of the word (the citizen is at the same
time the subject of the state, the bourgeois, the citoyen of the French revolution,
the subject of the polis, the supporter of direct democracy), these
democrats address themselves to all classes. The citizens of civil society
oppose themselves to the passivity of consumers as much as to the open revolt
of the exploited against the constituted order. They are the good conscience of
the state (or public, as they prefer to say) institutions, those who will
always invite the police to “isolate the violent” in any
In the
Negrian account, the true subject of history is a strange beast of a thousand
metamorphoses (first mass-worker, then social laborer, now multitude) and a thousand tricks. In
fact, it is this being that has power even when everything would seem to bear
witness to the contrary. All that domination imposes is really what this being
has desired and won. The technological apparatus embodies its collective
knowledge (not its alienation). Political power favors its thrusts from the
bottom (not its recuperation). The legal Right formalizes its power
relationship with the institutions (not its repressive integration). In this
edifying historical vision, everything happens according to the schemes of a
most orthodox Marxism. The development of the productive forces – authentic
maker of progress – continually comes into contradiction with social
relationships, modifying the order of society in the direction of emancipation.
The arrangement is the same as classical German social democracy, to which the
privilege of having broken a revolutionary assault in blood and then thrown the
proletariat into the hands of Nazism is owed. And the illusion of opposing the
power of political institutions to that of the multinationals is a social
democratic illusion, one that Negri shares with the leftist statists of Le Monde
Diplomatique.
If both denounce “savage capitalism”, “fiscal paradises”, the “dictatorship of
the market” so often, it is because they want a new political order, a new government
of globalization, another New Deal. It is in this sense that one reads the
proposal for a universal income for citizenship. Thus, the less
“dialectical” Negrians have no scruples in openly presenting this demand as a
recasting of capitalism.
Despite
two decades of heavy social conflict, capitalism succeeded in turning the
revolutionary threat around through a process that reached its completion at
the end of the 1970’s with the dismantling of the productive centers and their
spread over the territory and with the complete subjection of science to power.
This conquest of every social space corresponds to the entry of capital into
the human body, as the final frontier that remains empty, through the very life
processes of the species itself. Necrotechnologies are the latest examples of
its longing for an entirely artificial world. But for Negri, this is the
expression of the creativity of the multitude. For him, the total subordination
of science to capital, the investment in services, knowledge and communications
(the birth of “human resources” according to managerial language) expresses the
“becoming-woman” of labor, i.e., the
productive force of bodies and of sensibility. In the epoch of “immaterial
labor”, the means of production that multitude must secure for itself as common
property are the intellects. In such a sense, technology increasingly
democratizes society, since the knowledge that capital turns to its account
surpasses every waged sphere, in fact coinciding with the very existence of the
human being. This is what the demand for a minimum guaranteed wage means: if
capital makes us produce at every moment, then it should pay us even if we are
not employed as wage workers and we will make money for it by consuming.
The
conclusions of Negri and his associates are the complete overturning of the
ideas of those who, already back in the 1970’s, maintained that the revolution
passes through the body, that the proletarian condition is increasingly
universal and that daily life is the authentic place of social war. The aim of
recuperators is always the same. In the ‘70’s, in order to gain their place in
the sun, they spoke of sabotage and class war; today they propose the
constitution of civic lists, accords with the parties, entry into the institutions.
Their jargon and their linguistic acrobatics show that the Marxist dialectic is
capable of every gallantry. Passing from Che to Massimo Cacciari*, from the peasants of
For
“disobedient” theorists, the political institutions are hostage of a
multinational capital, mere registration chambers of global economic processes.
In reality, the development of technological power is the material basis for
the thing defined as globalization; and from the nuclear to the cybernetic, from the
preparation of new materials to genetic engineering, from electronics to
telecommunication, this development is linked to the fusion of the industrial
and scientific apparatus with the military apparatus. Without the aerospace
sector, without the high-speed railroad, without the connections through
fiber-optic cables, without ports and airports, how could a global market
exist? We add the fundamental role of military operations, the continuous
exchange of data between banking, insurance, medical and police systems, the
state management of environmental pollution, the increasing spread of the net
of surveillance, and it becomes clear that it is a mystification to speak of
the decline of the state. What is changing is merely one specific state form.
Unlike
other social democrats, for Negri the defense of the “social” national state is
no longer possible, inasmuch as it is a political formation that is already
surpassed. But this opens an even more ambitious prospect: European democracy.
In fact, from one side, power is posed the problem of how to pacify social
tensions caused by the crisis in representative politics. From the other side,
the “disobedient” seek new paths for making the institutions democratic,
rendering the movement more institutional. Here is the possible encounter: “Who
then has an interest in the politically united
We have
come to the end. Under a dense smokescreen of slogans and catch phrases, under
a jargon that both flirts and terrorizes, here is a program that is simple for
capital and magnificent for the multitude. We’ll try to summarize it. Thanks to
a guaranteed wage, the poor could be flexible in the production of wealth and
the reproduction of life and thus relaunch the economy. Thanks to the common
ownership of the new means of production (intellect), the “immaterial
proletariat” could “begin a long Zapatista march of the intellectual labor
force through
But the
agitated waters of the current hide dangerous traps, as Negri himself warns:
“now we find ourselves in an imperial constitution in which monarchy and
aristocracy struggle between them, but the plebeian assemblies are absent. This
creates a situation of imbalance, since the imperial form can only exist in a
pacified manner when these three elements are counter-balanced among
themselves.” (from MicroMega, May
2001). In short, dear Senators,
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
Today the barbarians are coming.
Why is the Senate so idle?
Why do the Senators pass no laws?
Because today the barbarians are coming.
What laws could the Senators pass?
When the barbarians come, they will make them.
Why did the emperor rise so early,
to sit at the main gate of the city, solemn,
on his throne wearing the crown on his head?
Because today the barbarians are coming,
and the emperor waits to receive their chief.
Indeed, he has prepared a scroll to give to him
on which many names and titles are inscribed for him.
This morning in their embroidered, crimson togas;
why are they wearing bracelets studded with amethysts,
and rings with brilliant, glistening emeralds;
and why are they carrying their costly canes today,
wonderfully carved with silver and gold?
Because today the barbarians are coming,
and such things dazzle barbarians.
to have their say?
Because today the barbarians are coming,
and barbarians disdain eloquence and long speeches.
(How serious the faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so quickly,
As everyone turns homeward, deep in thought?
Because it is night, and the barbarians have not
arrived.
And some people have come from the borders
saying that there are no longer any barbarians.
After all, those people were a solution.
—Constantine Kavafis
“The dream of the formation
of a world empire is not only found in ancient history: it is the logical
outcome of all the activities of power, and it is not limited to any specific
period. Though it has gone through many variations, the vision of global
domination connects with the rise of new social conditions and has never
disappeared from the political horizon…” —Rudolf Rocker
“The servitude to which the
subjects of
“A single law, the law
imposed by
(Page numbers in
parentheses following quotes refer to Empire by Hardt and Negri)
EMPIRE
A nightmare
torments the servants of the Empire – the nightmare of its collapse. All the
courtiers scattered around the world, political celebrities and generals,
administrative delegates and advertisers, journalists and intellectuals, are
asking themselves how to avert this terrible threat.
The Empire is
present everywhere, but doesn’t govern anywhere. Its military invincibility
shines in the sun dazzling its obsequious admirers. But its foundations are
rotten. The social order within its borders is constantly called into question.
In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall was presented as the symbolic act that
would ratify the end of the “cold war” between the two opposed super-powers,
the dawn of a new era of peace and stability. The unification of the planet
under a single model of life, the private capitalist model, was supposed to
guarantee the definitive banishing of all conflict. In a certain sense, one
could say that the very opposite has happened. In modern history, there have
never been so many violent conflicts bathing the world in blood as after 1989.
If up to then, the various armies were in a state of permanent readiness, now they
are in continuous mobilization. The military forces no longer spend their time
training, but rather fighting on the field. War has gone from cold to hot, in
some places boiling, and it is generalizing itself. Only now the slaughter
dictated by the state is no longer called war, but rather police actions. Having extended itself everywhere, the Empire no longer
has external enemies from which to defend itself, only internal enemies to
control and repress. As the servants of the Empire love to remind us, there is
no longer an outside; there is only an inside. But this inside is literally
imploding.
In order to make
space for itself, the Empire has swept away the old model of the nation-state.
But how does one convince entire populations that were held together and
rendered tame up to now by the glue of popular identity that – for example –
Serbs and Kosovars, or Israelis and Palestinians, no longer exist, that instead
there are only subjects made similar through obedience to a single social
system? Thus, in the moment of its triumph, the Empire stirs up and renews
fierce civil wars.
In order to
consolidate itself, the Empire has fused political and economic power,
scientific and military power in a single apparatus. But how can it do without
the specific political activity indispensable to maintaining equilibrium – the
mediation that is above all moderation – without rushing at full speed into the
unbridled search for maximum profit? Thus in the moment of its triumph, the
empire rouses strong social tensions.
In order to take
root the Empire has imposed the religion of money everywhere. But how could
anyone think that the transcendence of the rites and traditions of thousands of
years, which have saturated every sphere of social life and given meaning to
the existence of millions of devotees, could abandon its place to the immanence
of the commodity without rousing rebellions? The sacred book of Christianity
itself, the Bible, records the fury of Christ before the presence of merchants
in the temple and their violent removal: “It is written: My house will be
called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves” (Matthew
We find ourselves
facing a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, the reign of capital has
succeeded in conquering an absolute domination in uniting East and West under a
single banner, in annulling every vision of human existence that is not based
on the laws of the economy. But on the other hand, with all the power acquired,
with its Praetorians spread to every corner to protect profits, capitalism is
demonstrating that it is not in a position to control anything. The Empire is
feared, but it is not loved. It is endured, not chosen. It possesses force, not
consent. If it wants to remove the threat of collapse as far as possible, it
has only one path to travel: that of making people accept it not through
imposition, but through participation, that of being recognized as right,
necessary, inevitable.
But how can the
Empire – synonymous with a social order based on tyranny and arrogance, cause
of cruelty and suffering – manage to make itself loved by its subjects? It
imposes control with weapons. It obtains consent with blandishments. If the
Empire wants to instill its reasons into its subjects with the aim of making
them accept and appreciate these reasons, it must play tricks, having recourse
to the aid of emissaries. Those who shine only in the art of adulation are
certainly not among the most cunning since they would quickly be unmasked for
what they are – servants among servants. No, such a complex and delicate task
could only be brought to term by those who know how to display the limits of
imperial order. Biting observations with regard to the Empire always fascinate
the quarrelsome subjects who are drawn into a fictitious complicity by these
emissaries and therefore don’t realize that the critique of imperfection is
functional to the achievement of perfection, transforming the Empire from
something we need to get rid of into something we need to correct but that we
cannot do without.
As evidence of the
urgency with which the labors of restructuring and enlargement of the imperial
edifice must be carried out, its emissaries are making themselves increasingly
numerous. Two of them, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, have recently published
a book that is gaining a reasonable success. Flaunting their academic jargon in
order to subdue the ignorance of the subjects, the usual stale and blunted
intimidating weapon of intellectual terrorism in search of approval, these two
professors put the finger on the festering spots of the Empire, seeking at the
same time to explain to their reader why
they really cannot do without accepting it. The title of this masterpiece of Empire-loving dissent is a
homage to its beloved parent: Empire.
UNWILLINGLY
How is a condition
of dispossession, of alienation, of exploitation made acceptable without
rousing some feeling of rage and rebellion? The answer is only apparently
impossible. It is sufficient to instill the belief that what they are living
through, governed by a tragic as well as fatal necessity, is unavoidable in anyone who suffers this
condition. The instilling of dominant values, in fact, forms the basis of
social reproduction. Etienne De La Boetie, in his immortal Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, makes note of how the servile
acceptance of the power of the few by the many can be traced back to coutume, the meaning of which fluctuates between that of
historical-traditional custom and that of psychological habit: it points to a
process of adaptation to the form of society into which the human being finds
her/himself inserted, a process that ends up determining a great portion of
her/his behavior.
The main reason
why people accept their submission to power is because they are born and raised
as servants. “It is still true” – La Boetie argues – “that at first man serves
unwillingly, constrained by a greater power; but those that come later, having
never seen freedom, and not even knowing what it is, serve without any regrets
and willingly do what their ancestors did under duress. And so people who are
born with the yoke on their neck, nurtured and raised in servitude, without
raising theirs eyes even a little before themselves, are satisfied to live as
they were born, without managing to imagine good and right things different
from those that are to be found in front of them, they take the conditions in
which they are born as natural.” This means that we can only become aware of
the lack of freedom if we have had a way of experiencing or knowing it. The
experience of prison is only a tragedy if we are able to compare it with an
experience of freedom, however supervised and conditioned it may be, from which
we were snatched at the moment of our capture. Our desire for escape, for
revolt, springs from the profound difference that exists between these two
lived experiences. But if we are born and grew up in prison, if the walls of a
prison formed our entire horizon, filled all our dreams, marked all our
actions, how could we desire a freedom we had never known? Since detention had
been our sole and customary condition of life, perhaps we would consider it
natural and, finally accepting it willingly. Or even thinking, as Orwell
warned, that slavery is freedom.
Like other forms
of domination, the Empire bases its continuity on the supposed naturalness of
the power that it wields. The critique of Empire as such, in its totality and
not in its individual aspects, is made to appear as a form of madness or
aberration. But this objectification of domination requires further support,
more solid and convincing, beyond that of habit. As the same La Boetie recalls:
“There is no heir so thoughtless and indifferent that at some time he doesn’t
take a look at the family register to see if he enjoys all the rights of
succession or if instead there has not been some machination against him or his
predecessors.” Habit by itself is not enough. Someone might end up getting
bored with it and abandon this individual
psychological mechanism.
Therefore, it is necessary to fix the “family registers” with a collective historical mechanism, in such a manner that their
reading decrees a univocal and definitive result for everyone. But how?
It is easy to
comprehend that a total censure of our rights, the exclusion of any of us from
the registers to the exclusive profit of the one who holds power would appear
at least suspicious and might provoke a furious reaction: and us, who are we?
If nothing is given to us, we will take it all! Rather, it is more intelligent
to include us in the legacy, to integrate us attributing the responsibility for
what happens to us, to deceive us with the request of participation in the
events of the family, in such a way as to make us perceive the reality that
surrounds us not as something that dominates us, but as a product that we
resolutely desire and to which we have directly contributed with our activity
and that consequently belongs to us. If “when the state prepares to kill it
calls itself the fatherland,” as Durrenmatt said, it is because it wants
citizens to fight, believing that they are doing it for themselves, without
noticing that they die “for the bank vaults” (Anatole France, quoted on p. 93).
In the same way, the reason that the bosses call it a company when they prepare
to make profit is because they want their “subordinates” to work, thinking that
they do it for themselves, without noticing that they are exploited exclusively
for the bosses’ benefit. Obedience becomes absolute, sheltered from doubt, when
it is no longer seen as coercion or hereditary weakness, but as the expression
of a social will.
In this regard,
the two emissaries seem exceedingly bashful in affirming that “Flirting with
Hegel, one could say that the construction of Empire is good in itself but not for itself” (p. 42). In reality, their
relationship with the father of dialectics is not mere coquetry; it is an
authentic love story. Their analysis of the Empire is carried out in conformity
with the Hegelian dialectic. This is no accident. Hegel was convinced that his
philosophy would represent the spirit of the time in which it had emerged.
Therefore, thanks to its superiority over philosophies of the past, he felt
compelled to claim as its task the demonstration that the society in which it
arose (i.e., the historical reality of the Prussian state) constituted the peak
of all previous civilizations. On careful consideration, it is the same
ambition that moves the two emissaries with regard to the Empire.
One of Hegel’s
peculiarities, that for which the shrewdest functionaries of domination should
remember him with gratitude, consists in his understanding that unity – to
which every form of power aspires – would appear invincible if, rather than
basing itself on the exclusion of the multiplicity – i.e., the opposition – it
found its realization in the assimilation of the latter. In other words, for
Hegel, concrete unity could be achieved by reconciling differences, not by
exterminating them. It is only through the differences between the multiplicity
of things and through their conflicts that one can achieve concrete, lasting
unity. Thus, for Hegel, unity really springs forth from the continuous struggle
between the multiplicity of things that compose it. His lie is manifest: if
this unity doesn’t suppress the multiple, it doesn’t realize it either, since
it is limited to domesticating it in order to place it in the service of the
initial thesis. This is the meaning of the dialectic to which Hegel entrusts
the task of revealing the most intimate processes of reality. In the Hegelian
dialectical process, the affirmation of a concept forms the thesis; its
negation forms the antithesis. From the conflict between the thesis and the
antithesis, the synthesis will be born, which coagulates thesis and antithesis
in a higher unity in which both are conceived as different moments. But the synthesis represents in a particular way a return
to the thesis, in fact being a matter of a return enriched by all the things
that have been contributed by the antithesis. It seems clear that the pure existence of two contraries
is not enough to generate a dialectical relationship. To achieve such an end,
something more is needed: mediation between the two contraries. To mediate two
contraries means to take away their irreducibility, to bind them together, to
create a communicative bridge between them. It means to pacify them through
reconciliation, but to the advantage of one particular side – the one that was
strongest from the start.
According to
Hegel, the dialectic was not just “the nature of thought itself”. Maintaining
the identity of the rational and the real, he interpreted the dialectic as the
law of reality as well. All reality would move dialectically, following an
objective mechanism. In such a way that what
is at the same time
constitutes what must be, i.e., it
is self-justified in all its manifestations that are therefore “necessary” in
the sense of not being able to be different than what they are. For Hegel, to
oppose that which is something other to reality means to abandon reason in
favor of self-interest or individual free will, a thing utterly mad since, in
his opinion, only the rational is real. Under the gears of this determinist
mechanism, history becomes the realization of a providential plane, and the
state becomes nothing less than the incarnation of the world spirit – a kind of
realization of God on earth.
What Hegel, as an
honest subject of the Prussian state, never takes into consideration is the
possibility of a completely autonomous, sovereign, uncompromising opposition –
a multiplicity that does not allow itself to be enrolled in any synthesis.
It is necessary to
acknowledge that Hegel was an excellent emissary of the Empire. His recognition
of the role developed for the opposition in the production of reality rendered
him attractive to the left. His synthesis that mediated contraries to the
benefit of the original thesis, i.e., the existent, rendered him attractive to
the right. This cheerful bourgeois man taught at the
Hardt and Negri
are scrupulous disciples of Hegel, as we will see. But their analysis draws
inspiration from other thinkers as well, some of whom passed into history as
subversives, although the effort to justify the necessity of authority and the
order it imposes is evident in their work. Hegel’s most famous student, the
Marx who was so convinced that “the bourgeois has had a highly revolutionary
function in history” is another constant point of reference for the two
emissaries of the Empire, especially in the elaboration of political
perspectives. In fact, interpreting the entire history of humanity in light of the
Hegelian determinist philosophical mechanism, Marx openly supported the
progressive growth of capitalism as the way to reach communism: “the
development of big industry, thus, removes the very terrain on which it
produces the products and appropriates them for itself from under the feet of
the bourgeoisie. First of all, it produces its gravediggers. Its decline and
the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
For Marx and for
his crony, Engels, revolution did not constitute the negation of the
civilization of capital, a breaking point in its deadly progression, but rather
its felicitous final outcome. In the certainty that the triumph of the
bourgeoisie would automatically provoke the triumph of the proletariat, he
ended up supporting the development of capitalism and fighting against those
who opposed it. This sort of disguised fatalism led him to assume rather
reactionary positions such as, for example, hoping for the victory of Prussia
in the war with France, in the conviction that the foundation of the German
empire by Bismarck would bring about the political and economic centralization
of Germany, a factor that in his opinion formed the initial condition for the
advent of socialism. Moreover, his idea of social transformation as completion rather than rupture pushed him to advocate the
necessity of modeling the means and ends of proletarian struggle on those of
their adversary, theorizing that the workers would have to organize in a party
in order to conquer state power.
From this point of
view, the analysis of the two emissaries is rigorously Marxist. And given the
nature of their mission, they could certainly not do without the valuable
suggestions of the counselor of the Prince, the “democratic Machiavelli” who is
considered the father of modern politics, that is to say the Reason of State,
expert in swindling the people and keeping them in chains. They sing his
praises, omitting to mention his maxim according to which there is “nothing […]
more vain and insolent than the multitude”. Even a theologian who smells of
heresy like Spinoza proves to be of use to them, both for his philosophical
reflections on the concept of potency and for his theological-political
reflections on the relationship between democracy and the multitude. The family
portrait is finished with the philosophers known as post-structuralists, those
French thinkers who, in order to defend this society from the subversion caused
by the death of God – that in May ’68 had found a way
to concretize itself in their country in the form of the largest wildcat strike
in history – announced the death of man in every sphere, with the aim of
spreading resignation by making the individual into a mere lump of social,
political, technological and linguistic devices. The influence of the “desiring
machines” of Deleuze and Guattari is particularly strong.
A certain
involuntary sincerity in the two emissaries about the true nature of their
mission takes us be surprise when. In dealing with a possible social
transformation, they invite us to abandon the old metaphor of the revolutionary
mole in favor of the snake. In fact, they expound, feeding the suspicion that
“Marx’s old mole has finally died. It seems to us, in fact, that in the
contemporary passage to Empire, the structured tunnels of the mole have been
replaced by the infinite undulations of the snake.” (p. 57) The mole has done
its time. Its extinction in the sphere of political zoology will be caused by
its blindness that renders it immune to calculation. And yet, if this animal
inspires sympathy, it is precisely because it is incapable of intrigues. Armed
only with stubbornness and guided by intuition, the mole keeps on digging
without ever losing its spirit, in hope of emerging at the right place. The
snake is a completely different beast. It doesn’t dig, but crawls. It advances
with “undulations”, from right to left, from left to right (the image of
opportunism). Furthermore, since the time of Adam and Eve, it is known for its
forked tongue (symbol of the lie). Thus, at best, it represents the dual nature
of the two emissaries and their supposed fathers, prodigals with bundles on
their backs and broad smiles for the subjects insofar as these latter intend to
remain such.
GO TO WORK!
The two emissaries
describe the subjects as “multitude”, a neutral term of the quantitative sort
taken from some scholars of the past that is useful for avoiding the
encumbrance of using a qualitative description of sides. Their aim is to
convince the subjects that although it may be true that the Empire shows many
defects, it is also true that its existence is the result of a right and
inevitable necessity. That if the Empire is the One that represents the Many,
it is only because it expresses them in a precise arithmetical sum, not because
it annihilates them inside itself. That its functioning is not something that
the multitudes now suffer, but that they themselves have determined,
intentionally or not. In a word, that the will of the Empire is not, in fact,
opposed to the desires of the multitude, but that, on the contrary, it is their
expression and realization, even if lacking – which is why there is no reason
whatsoever for wanting its destruction. Quite so!
But let’s consider
how the emissaries liquidate Etienne De La Boetie’s critique. They are aware
that “when the boss hails you on the shop floor, or the high school principle
hails you in the school corridor, a subjectivity is formed. The material
practices set out for the subject in the context of the institution (be they
kneeling down to pray or changing hundreds of diapers) are the production
processes of subjectivity” (pp. 195-6) and that consequently “the various
institutions of modern society should be viewed as an archipelago of factories
of subjectivity” (p.196). But, in fact, the two emissaries do not denounce the
process of the reproduction of the existent with its social division that, in
everyday actions, in their serial repetition, in the daily habit that
accompanies us from birth to death, day after day, without giving us a moment
of autonomy, is the thing that destroys the uniqueness of the individual.
Rather they hail the thing that constructs its subjectivity. The extraordinary
mystifying power of words! The misunderstanding is created through the use of
the concept of “subjectivity”, which they clearly prefer over that of
“individuality”. In themselves, the observations of the two emissaries are
accurate, but the meaning that is drawn out of them is totally distorted, since
the subjects are led to look with benevolent eyes upon these “factories of
subjectivity”. But ultimately, what is so bad about this? Isn’t subjectivity
“the quality of one who is subjective”? And isn’t the subjective “that which is
relative to the subject, that which derives from the way of feeling, thinking
and deciding proper to the individual as such”? Any dictionary could testify to
this without uncertainty, but let’s take our consultation further, to the
bottom. What is the subject? The subject is “the person or thing taken into
consideration”, but it is also “one who is subordinate, submissive,
subjugated.” Indeed, these terms derive from the Latin subiectus, past participle of subicere, or to subject. To
affirm that subjectivity is relative to the individual means rendering
submission natural, transforming a historical event into a biological fact. So
subjectivity expresses the quality of one who is underneath, subordinate,
submissive, subjugated. And what is the quality of one who is subjected if not
that of obeying, something that one will do so much more willingly if one
thinks that this is included in the nature of the individual as such? This is
how it is possible to use the persuasive force of rhetoric to push the subjects
to go to work in these “factories of subjectivity”, i.e., of servitude, rather
than blowing them up.
Of course, a
factory is more productive when discipline reigns among the worker-subjects,
but there is a problem. Far too often, the subjects have the ugly defect of
considering discipline a form of domestication. This is why throughout history
they have sought to avoid it or shatter it in every way. ‘What ever for then?’
the two emissaries ask themselves, convinced that “discipline is not an
external voice that dictates our practices from on high, overarching us, as Hobbes
would say, but rather something like an inner compulsion indistinguishable from
our will, immanent to and inseparable from our subjectivity itself” (p. 329).
It is undeniable that discipline is inseparable from our subjectivity since, as
we have just seen, subjectivity indicates submission. But it is the claim that
the strict observance of the master’s rules by the slave is due not so much to
the fear of the lash as to “an inner compulsion indistinguishable from our
will” that Mr. Hardt and Mr. Negri cannot support without admitting on which
side of the barricades they are to be found: on the side of those who uphold
slavery. Their entire historical reconstruction of the birth and development of
the Empire goes in this direction. The slave desires his chains and builds them
himself. The subjects desire the Empire and have built it themselves. Its
formation is inevitable because it expresses the biological outcome of human
nature and the dialectical out come of the history of humanity at the same
time.
The preoccupation
with legitimating imperial determinism is also manifested in the tiresome
mechanistic language used by the two emissaries, ultimately persuaded that they
human being must fade into the gear, that autonomy must give way to automatism,
and that fantasy must surrender before functionality. What is Empire? “Empire
thus appears in the form of a very high tech machine” (p. 39) or to be clearer
“Empire constitutes the ontological fabric*” (p. 354). What are the subjects, the “multitude”? “The multitude not
only uses machines to produce, but also becomes increasingly machinic itself,
as the means of production are increasingly integrated into the minds and
bodies of the multitude” (p. 406). What is desire? Desire is described as an
“ontological motor” (p. 389). What is language? Unfailingly, the answer
arrives: “by language we mean machines of intelligence that are continuously
renovated by the affects and subjective passions” (p. 366). These are only a
few examples of the technical – and, as such, above sides – language that fills
this text.
But presenting the
evolution of civilization as the mechanism of a megamachine is not enough. In
saying this one justifies resignation in the presence of the social pollution
it produced, but the rage at being changed into mere cogs is not neutralized.
The two emissaries must thus carry out another effort. They must make the
subject understand that “In reality, we are masters of the world, because our
desire and labor regenerate it continuously” (p. 388) and that consequently we
have very little to complain about. We, the masters of the world?
THE REVERSE SIDE OF THE COIN
In our
unspeakable ignorance, we thought that the ambition of every power was to
consolidate and expand itself to the point where it assumes true and proper
imperial significance, but that the final realization of this depends on the
relations of existing forces. And of course, this objective can only be
achieved by knowing how to generate the shockwaves necessary to disperse one’s
adversaries. On the contrary, the two emissaries declare: “The multitude called
Empire into being” (p. 43) since “the class struggle, pushing the nation state
toward its abolition and thus going beyond the barriers posed by it, proposes
the constitution of Empire as the site of analysis and conflict” (p. 237).
We thought that
labor was synonymous with human activity only within capitalist society, a bit
like animals in captivity are synonymous with nature only in a zoo. An equation
that is decidedly repugnant to everyone except for those who think that “work
makes us free”, as the Nazis announced at the entrance of concentration camps,
or who hold that the bars of a cage serve to protect animals from external
dangers. On the contrary, the two emissaries don’t hesitate to argue that:
“Living labor… is the vehicle of possibility… labor… now appears as general
social activity. Labor is productive excess with respect to the existing order
and the rules of its production. This productive excess is … the force of collective
emancipation…” (p. 357), which is why “The new phenomenology of the labor of
the multitude reveals labor as the fundamental creative activity that through
cooperation goes beyond any obstacle imposed on it and constantly creates the
world” (p. 402).
We thought the
identification of human life with the production of goods was one of the most
insipid advertising lies, incapable of conceiving of anything other than
economic balance sheets. This is the sort of fraud that has reduced poetry to a
source of inspiration for advertising. On the contrary, the two emissaries
inform us that “the desire to exist and the desire to produce are one and the
same thing” (p. 349).
We thought that
the hegemony conquered by the great multinationals over international economic
and political life, with the consequent transformation of the world into one
huge shopping center had brought about the homogenization of lifestyles as well
as the disappearance of all singularity. As a noted American journalist pointed
out, the choice today is between Coke and Pepsi. On the contrary, the two
emissaries observe that “Far from being unidimensional, the process of
restructuring and unifying command over production was actually an explosion of
innumerable different production systems. The processes of the unification of
the world market operated paradoxically through diversity and diversification…”
(p. 252).
We thought that
the blackmail which the subjects have to undergo, working to survive or dying
of hunger, was the element that forced millions of people to abandon the land
of their birth to go in search of a morsel of bread. No one is so idiotic as to
confuse emigration caused by lack with the spirit of adventure born from
exuberance. On the contrary, the two emissaries hold that uprooting and
mobility constitute “a powerful form of class struggle within and against
imperial postmodernity” (p. 213) since “ through circulation, the multitude
reappropriates space and constitutes itself as an active subject” (p. 397).
We thought that
for over half a century technological progress was maintained by research
conducted in military experimental laboratories, and was exploited for civilian
purposes as well only at a propitious moment. Through it Empire is able to
reinforce its war apparatus, perfect social control and maximize economic
profit. On the contrary, the two emissaries are convinced that only struggles
“constrain capital to adopt ever higher levels of technology and thus transform
labor processes. The struggles force capital continually to reform the
relations of production and transform the relations of domination” (p.208).
We thought that
the Internet represented a kind of New World for the Empire: on the one hand
the invention of yet another universe to colonize, and on the other hand a way
to ease internal social pressures. Navigating in electronic limbo, the subjects
can savor a virtual freedom in exchange for real obedience. On the contrary the
two emissaries are moved, noting that “in the expression of its own creative
energies, immaterial labor thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of
spontaneous and elementary communism” (p. 294).
We thought that
through information technology the Empire had succeeded in imposing a reduced
language based on technological necessity and not on the richness of meaning.
The subjects are forced to give up meeting in a real plaza in direct
communication, since this is replaced by a virtual plaza with mediated
communication; thus, they are no longer able to discuss, expressing ideas and
emotions with all their incalculable shading, but only to exchange cold facts
and figures. On the contrary, the two emissaries are happy to “participate in a
more radical and profound commonality than has ever been experienced in the history
of capitalism. The fact is that we participate in a productive world made up of
communication and social networks, interactive services, and common languages.
Our economic and social reality is defined less by material objects and that
are made and consumed than by co-produced services and relationships. Producing
increasingly means constructing cooperation and communicative commonalities”
(p. 302).
We thought that
biotechnology represented the highest point of the triumph of capital over
nature, economic reason’s inroad into the organic body. The proposal for
genetically reprogramming the human being, for suppressing differences in favor
of the dominant normality, made a brief appearance behind the promises of
eternal health and happiness (but it has now come in arrogantly). On the
contrary, the two emissaries do nothing but applaud this new conquest since
“Biopower – a horizon of the hybridization of the natural and the artificial,
needs and machines, desire and collective organization of the economic and the
social – must continually regenerate itself in order to exist” (p. 389).
How many other
untimely thoughts could still be expressed? If it has been noted from more than
one side how Marx could not hide a certain admiration for the behavior of the
bourgeoisie despite his criticisms, for their part, the two emissaries show all
their unbridled enthusiasm for the world born from the planetary domination of
capital, which they pass off as the planetary triumph of the subjects: “Is it
possible to imagine US agriculture and service industries without Mexican
migrant labor, or Arab oil without Palestinians and Pakistanis? Moreover, where
would the great innovative sectors of immaterial production, from design to
fashion and from electronics to science in Europe, the United States, and Asia,
be without the ‘illegal labor’ of the great masses, mobilized toward the
radiant horizon of capitalist wealth and freedom?” (p. 397). Even the greatness
of the Egyptian pyramids could not form a valid justification for the terrible
suffering endured by the slaves who built them, let’s just imagine whether
transgenic corn, oil wells, the procession of fashion or the microchip could be
this justification!
But one last move
is allowed to us. We thought that throughout history, subjects, faced with
great imperial power and Praetorian arrogance, have always had very few
alternatives: to obey or to rebel. In the moments that they obey, the subjects
merely reproduce the Empire and guarantee its stability. Therefore, it is only
in the times of revolt against the order of the Empire that they can cease to
be subjects and determine themselves as free individuals, going to storm the
heavens of their aspirations. The two emissaries know this well, but they also
know that their task is really to place revolt in the service of the Empire.
It’s a matter of putting the unforgotten lesson of Hegel into practice. The two
emissaries themselves concede that “The Empire does not fortify its boundaries
to push others away, but rather pulls them within its pacific order, like a
powerful vortex” (p. 198). Thus, the dialectic shows that the thesis is the
Empire and its foul* order; the antitheses are the subjects, the “multitude”, and their
struggle; the synthesis is reconciliation, the overcoming of contradictions,
which in reality conceals the return to the thesis: the order of the Empire
enriched by the creativity expressed in the struggles of the subjects. It’s an
outline that isn’t very far from Marx’s interpretation of the servant-master dialectic
that is found at the origin of his concept of class struggle.
Interpreted in
this way, it is possible for the long process that led to the formation of the
existent to no longer be perceived by the subjects as domestication, but rather
as liberation. That which is – that is at the same time also that which must be – should no longer be seen as a misery, but as a richness.
Given that: “The multitude is the real productive force of our social world
whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality
of the multitude” (p. 62), one must deduce from this that “The refusal of
exploitation – or really resistance, sabotage, insubordination, rebellion and
revolution – constitutes the motor force of the reality in which we live, and
at the same time its living opposition” (pp. 208-9) The final conclusion of
such reasoning is imposed by itself: “The
proletariat actually invents the social and productive forms that capital will
be forced to adopt in the future” (p. 268). In short, it is not the Empire, through the
exercise of power, but the subjects, with their struggle’s against the Empire’s
power, who are creating the world that surrounds us. Thanks to their
dialectical proceedings, the two emissaries overturn reality and try to make
the defeats of the subjects pass for victories in perspective. Thus paradise
approaches.
THE HEADS OF THE EAGLE
It is true, however, that in doing so, Hardt
and Negri occasionally fall into some significant contradictions. It is not
always easy to convince the subjects that “The organization of mass trade
unions, the construction of the welfare state, and social-democratic reformism
were all results of the relations of force that the mass worker defined and the
overdetermination it imposed on capitalist development” (p. 409). Whereas
earlier they maintained that “Against the common wisdom that the US proletariat
is weak because of its low party and union representation with respect to
Europe and elsewhere, perhaps we should see it as strong for precisely these
reasons” (p. 269).
Why would the
proletariat ever have had to impose its representative forms on capital if its
strength is greater without them? Starting from the conception that unions and
parties were conceded by power because of the struggles carried out by the
subjects, the two emissaries try to interpret this as meaning that these same
struggles intentionally imposed them. Despite appearances, these two
conceptions are not the same thing. In the first case, the institution
of representation is a victory for power, a way to vanquish the combativeness
of the rebels; in the second case, it is a conquest of the rebels, the
objective attained by their battles. But if the proletariat is stronger without
unions and parties, as Hardt and Negri acknowledge, then who benefits in
instituting them? Clearly the one who has granted them, i.e., power, that in
this way blocks the real threat brought about by a rebellion without mediation.
The first union
did not appear until the second half of the 19th century. Any idea
of class struggle, of the subversion of the capitalist order, was completely
foreign to it since its only purpose was to reconcile the interests of the
workers with those of the bosses. By organizing workers on the level of struggles
for specific demands and seeking to limit exploitation to obtain a distribution
of production that was less unfavorable for the workers, the union fights to
obtain increases in wages, the reduction of working hours, guarantees against
arbitrariness, etc. In other words, in the best of cases, the union aims to get
a new division of the goods, but without directly calling the nature of the
social order itself into question. Its function consists of offering
correctives to the development of capitalism, because capitalism’s ruthless
search for profit renders it myopic in the evaluation of the possible social
relapses provoked by its choices. This is why the nature of the union is
intrinsically reformist. Any economic struggle conducted within the limits of capitalist
society only permits the workers to remain workers, perpetuating their slavery.
The tune doesn’t
change when one examines the function of the party, the origin of which
precedes that of the union by a few years. Both emerge in the period of the
affirmation of the bourgeois class. In England, the country with the oldest
parliamentary tradition, parties made their appearance with the Reform Act of
1832, which extended suffrage, allowing industrialists and business people of
the country to participate along with the aristocracy in the management of
public affairs; there is no need to say to whose detriment. The real function
of parties appears in an even more visible manner in Germany, where they were
born for the first time after the disorders of 1848. This means that it was the
defeat of the revolution that gave birth to parties, not its victory. It was
the fear of a possible new uprising of the masses that induced the state to
loosen the chain of its subjects, “conceding” the representative institution.
But, no matter how
much it is lengthened, no matter how much more movement it allows, a chain is
still a chain. In any case, the history of Germany shows how social-democratic
reformism was really spread in order to prevent a revolutionary solution to the
social problem: Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by the hired assassins of the
social democrat, Noske, who opened the way for Hitler’s conquest of power by
repressing the revolution of Councils.
The two emissaries
start from an observation that could be considered accurate, but once again
they turn its meaning on its head. They have reasoned perfectly in affirming
that the reality that surrounds us, the entire world in which we live carries
the indelible mark of social struggles under the cloak of grey conformity that
envelops it. But what they don’t mention is that this sign exists only in the
negative. We are surrounded by the ruins of our defeats, not by the monuments
of our victories.
An example for
all. It is beyond doubt that the revolutionary movements of 1848 pushed the
French government to entrust the architect, Haussmann, with the task of
redesigning the city plan of Paris, but it is equally true that the great
boulevards that are traveled by crowds of enraptured tourists were not devised
with the aim of facilitating “the nomadism of the multitude”, but rather the
movement of troops and their cannons in the eventuality of new rebellions to
repress!
It is true that
the illegal activities of the subjects stimulate the application of the results
of scientific research, but our streets are filled with video cameras in order
to further social control, certainly not to express the “machinic community”
achieved by man through technology. Rebellion pushes domination to perpetually
remodel the world, but the final result of this restructuring always
corresponds to the interests of those who govern, never of those who rebel.
If on the one hand
the two emissaries exalt the rebellions of the subjects while on the other hand
they maintain that their objectives are realized by the Empire itself, it is
because in this way they want to create a necessary dependence, an unbreakable
link between the subjects and the Empire. Even the organic metaphors that they
use are indicative of this purpose: “The emblem of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
an eagle with two heads, might give an adequate initial representation of the
contemporary form of Empire. But whereas in the earlier emblem the two heads
looked outward to designate the relative autonomy of the respective
territories, in our case the two heads would have to be turned inward, each
attacking the other” (pp. 59-60). As if to say that, even if the aspirations
are different, the body is the same. Thus, the imperial structure
doesn’t just respond to the needs of the ruling class, but also to those of the
ruled. The Empire – with its army, its police, its courts, its prisons, its
factories, its commercial centers, its televisions, its expressways… – is
desired by the emperor as well as by the subjects. It is simply a question of a
problem between heads. Once this concept is brought in,
the subjects understand that the aim of struggle is to bring about improvements
in the Empire by choosing to follow the correct head, thus leaving the body
unchanged.
The entire
analysis of Hardt and Negri aims to exclude any space for autonomous revolt
directed at destroying the body of the Empire as well. It is a possibility that
the two emissaries don’t even take into consideration, so as not to evoke
dangerous specters. When they describe the Empire as a “smooth world”, they
only end up confirming the contrary so well noted by Benjamin in his
time: “Celebration or defense endeavors to conceal the revolutionary moments in
the course of history. The fabrication of a continuity stands at its heart. It
confers value only to those elements of the operation that are already brought
in to make part of its posthumous influence. The points at which tradition is
interrupted get away from them, and thus the rough spots and crags that offer a
hand hold to those who want to make their own way beyond it.”
FREEDOM’S CORRECTIONS
The Empire is right. The Empire is
necessary. But unfortunately, the Empire is not perfect. Its immense
potentiality is held in check both by the survival of dogmas of the past from
which some imperial functionaries have not managed to separate themselves and
by the opposition without compromise carried forward by those subjects who
refuse to be such with the greatest determination.
The excess or
absence of the will to power are the two obstacles that must be removed
according to anyone who only aims for a just balance of power: “The first is
presented by the overbearing power of bourgeois metaphysics and specifically
the widely propagated illusion that the capitalist market and the capitalist
regime of production are eternal and insuperable. […] The second impediment is
represented by the numerous theoretical positions that see no alternative to
the present rule except a blind anarchic other and that thus partake in the
mysticism of the limit. From this ideological perspective, the suffering of
existence cannot manage to be articulated, become conscious and establish a
standpoint of revolt. This theoretical position leads merely to a cynical
attitude and quietistic practices. The illusion of the naturalness of
capitalism and the radicality of the limit actually stand in a relationship of
complimentarity. Their complicity is expressed in an exhausting powerlessness”
(pp. 386-7).
It is the struggle
against these two supposed cohabiting forms of impotence, accused of nothing
less than preventing a mysterious liberatory experience of work, that the two
emissaries propose to the subjects, who should certainly struggle against the
Empire (i.e., against those functionaries who love it for itself), but they should also struggle in favor of the Empire
(i.e., against those subjects who hate it in
itself).
In order to
resolve this problem, Marx’s contribution is fundamental. Just as Marx
proclaimed that the development of industry desired by the bourgeoisie would
lead the proletariat to victory, in the same way Hardt and Negri maintain that
the development of the Empire will lead to the victory of the “multitude”: “The
teleology of the multitude is theurgical: it consists in the possibility of
directing technologies and production toward its own joy and its own increase
of power. The multitude has no reason to look outside its own history and its
own present productive power for the means necessary for its constitution as a
political subject” (p.396). This is why the best way to fight the Empire
consists, paradoxically, in facilitating its growth. In fact, the two
emissaries claim to be certain of the fact that: “The passage to Empire and its
processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation.
Globalization, of course, is not one thing, and the multiple processes that we
recognize as globalization are not unified and univocal. Our political task, we
will argue, is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize and
redirect them toward new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that
sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing counter-Empire, an
alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges. The struggles
to contest and subvert Empire, as well as those to construct a real
alternative, will thus take place on the imperial terrain itself – indeed, such
struggles have already begun to emerge. Through these struggles and many more
like them, the multitude will have to invent new democratic forms and a new
constituent power that will one day take us through and beyond Empire”
(preface, p. xv).
It is thus
necessary to pass through Empire in order to overcome it. It’s not so much a
question of resisting its processes as of reorganizing them, possibly
entrusting such a task to the right people! Its formation is a positive event,
because it offers infinite possibilities to all. To think of acting otherwise,
of attaining an absolute break with the imperial universe, is an illusion born
from impotence. “The only strategy available to struggles is that of a
constituent counterpower that emerges from within Empire” (p. 59) the two
emissaries pound out without too much imagination. Who does not recognize the
notes of this song? It ultimately plagiarizes the dismal refrain of
Marxist-leninism: the counter-power of the multitude in opposition to imperial
power, counter-Empire in opposition to Empire, counter-globalization opposed to
globalization. And yet, who can ignore how the mad conviction that the
bourgeois state had to be fought and replaced by a proletarian state only led
to the installation of particularly repugnant totalitarian regimes, where
courts presided over farce-trials, soldiers took part in firing squads, police
filled the gulags with dissidents, the ruling class formed a grotesque
bureaucracy, the population suffered a tremendous oppression and misery?
But the two
emissaries don’t pay attention to such trifles, confident in the ability of the
imperial model to welcome the differences expressed by the “multitude” into
itself without standardizing them. It is sufficient to have the right
constitutional form. It is no accident if the principle rage that troubles them
is: “What does it mean to be republican today?” (p.208). The incredible aspect
is that they point to this question as fundamental and urgent for anyone who
intends to fight the Empire. The answer that they give doesn’t allow for a
reply: “Being republican today, then, means first of all struggling within and
constructing against Empire, on its hybrid, modulating terrains. And here we
should add against all moralisms and all positions of resentment and nostalgia,
that this imperial terrain provides greater possibilities for creation and
liberation. The multitude, in its will to be-against and its desire for
liberation, must push through Empire to come out the other side.” Notice that
the only thing to do is to go through Empire in order to come out on another
side!
Besides, our two
emissaries discreetly resort to the texts of Deleuze and Guattari who maintain
that, instead of resisting capitalist globalization, it is necessary to
accelerate its pace: “‘But which’ – they ask – ‘is the revolutionary path? Is
there one? – To withdraw from the world market…? Or might it be to go in the
opposite direction?’” Hardt and Negri aggravate the matter: “Empire can be
effectively contested only on its own level of generality and by pushing the
processes that it offers past their present limitations. We have to accept that
challenge and learn to think globally and act globally” (pp. 206-7).
From close up,
this far-seeing hope of theirs greatly resembles that of Leninists who take an
oath on the temporary nature of the dictatorship exercised by the party and on
the imminent extinction of the state (as soon as it has entered into their
possession, of course) and perjure themselves. It was sufficient to have the
correct communist program. In reality, once it has tasted power, with all the
vast privilege connected to it, no ruling class will ever voluntarily renounce
it. No state will ever extinguish itself on its own initiative. In the same
way, no Empire will ever respect and express the multiple differences present
within its borders. At most, it could engulf them and grind them down like
Moloch, in order to later spit them back out in the form of substitutes (as the
economic empire of McDonald’s is doing to a slight extent in its various
franchises around the globe, where, along with the hamburger for which it is
unfortunately famous, it presents typical local plates which share nothing with
the native dishes but the name with which they are advertised).
The Empire is not
inclusive; it is exclusive. Even the history of the pre-eminent Empire, that of
Rome, is significant from this perspective. No autonomy was conceded in the
conquered territories. It is enough to consider that in the language of ancient
Rome, the two concepts of foreigner and enemy are
indicated by a single word: hostis. The conviction that the Roman
Empire was only interested in the economic exploitation of subject peoples and
that it was guided by cosmopolitan ideals in their treatment is completely
mistaken. As soon as the Praetorian divisions extended military and political subjection,
the romanization of the occupied territories was also carried out with
implacable energy. The Roman Empire was nothing but a state, a state intent on
building up a colossal centralization of all social energy. And annihilating
difference – through repression or homogenization – is part of the logic of
every state that must necessarily strain toward general unification in order to
survive. Whatever the idea it represents, whatever the social structure it is
manifested in, whatever individual or group of individuals exercises it, in
every epoch and in every social context, power is always synonymous with
exploitation and oppression. Since it cannot be exercised by all individuals at
the same time and without distinction, equally and in conditions of absolute
mutuality, power is therefore the decision-making force concentrated in the
hands of the few, carried out and protected by armed force. Whether they are
few or many, capable or inept, this few will end up imposing their will and
making their interests prevail over all; they will end up becoming oppressors.
This trait is so
very visible in any epoch and in any human gathering, that the two emissaries
take good care not to ignore it. On the contrary, they confront the problem
directly, but in their own way: “In the process of the constitution of
sovereignty on the plane of immanence, there also arises an experience of
finitude that results from the conflictive and plural nature of the multitude
itself. The new principle of sovereignty seems to produce its own internal
limit. To prevent these obstacles from disrupting order and completely emptying
out the project, sovereign power must rely on the exercise of control. In other
words, after the first moment of affirmation comes a dialectical negation of
the constituent power of the multitude that preserves the teleology of the
project of sovereignty. Are we thus faced with a crisis in the elaboration of
the new concept? Does transcendence, first refused in the definition of the
source of power, return through the back door in the exercise of power, when
the multitude is posed as finite and thus demanding special instruments of
correction and control?” (p. 165).
To the enamored
eyes of the two emissaries, the virtuous exercise of power “seems” to meet with
an insurmountable obstacle: the “conflictive and plural nature” of the
multitude. Unable to live together with this freedom, power “must” correct and
control it. An unavoidable necessity, but one that may contradict its virginal
rectitude. Not wanting to escape this dead-end through an act of force, the two
emissaries are constrained to have recourse to an act of faith. Through great
stage tricks, they become converts – after chewing it over a bit – to the old
illusion of an American Constitution without authority, a technical-juridical
solution to the “intrinsic limits” of power. “That outcome is a constant
threat, but after having recognized these limits, the new US concept of
sovereignty opens with extraordinary force toward the outside, almost as if it
wanted to banish the idea of control and the moment of reflection from its own
constitution” (p. 165). A truly astounding conclusion if one considers the fate
of the Native Americans, the Indian tribes exterminated because their way of
life was incompatible with that of the young United States of America. Their
genocide – cleared away by the two emissaries as “a squalid event” –
constitutes the best example of the ability for any piece of paper to welcome,
express and guarantee the desires of the “multitude”.
It is clear that
the infinite multiplicity present in the human spirit can never be solicited,
developed and protected by any form of power. Chance does not love to see
itself sewn onto a uniform. Fantasy dies as soon as a legal code is applied.
Even all the solicitude, the prudence, the forbearance made available by a
hypothetical counter-power master of tolerance are only televised chattering
and academic speculation. No one can any longer ignore that in spite of its
supposed best intentions, counter-power will still end up liquidating its
rebels – guillotining them in the square in Paris, cutting them down like
partridges on the bastions of Kronstadt, shooting them along the roadsides of
Barcelona (or denouncing them to the police in the alleys of Genoa). Excess
cannot be contained in any unity of measure*, no matter how generous it may appear or be. This is why Empire is to
be destroyed. Not reorganized, reoriented, redefined, remodeled – but
annihilated down to its foundation. In their own way, even the two emissaries
must confront the moment of imperial decline and collapse. Having come to this
point, the use of the imperial conception itself forces us to come to terms
with those responsible for the end of the most famous Empire in history, the
Roman Empire.
It is time to
speak of the barbarians.
The young are reproached
for the use of violence. But don’t we find ourselves in an unending state of
violence? Given that we are born and raised in a prison, we know longer notice
that we are in stir, with hands and feet chained and a gag in the mouth. What
is it that you call legal status? A law that makes an enslaved herd of the
great mass of citizens, in order to satisfy the unnatural needs of an
insignificant and corrupt minority?
—Georg
Buchner
In civilization, I
vegetate; I am neither happy, nor free; why then should I desire this homicidal
order to be conserved? There is no longer anything to conserve of that which
the earth suffers.
—Ernest
Coeurderoy
We will not have demolished
everything if we don’t destroy the ruins
as well.—Alfred Jarry
BARBARIANS
The Empire has
counted the hours. Hardt and Negri nurture no doubts on this point, cherishing
the certainty that “A new nomad horde, a new race of barbarians will arise to
invade or evacuate Empire.” (p.213). Once the joyful tidings are announced, the
only thing left then is to again propose the question already raised by
Nietzsche – where are the barbarians? A basic
question, but one to which it is impossible to give an answer if one does not
first confront another question – who are the barbarians?
At his point it
becomes necessary to deepen the concept of barbarian, the definition of which contains
more than one meaning. Etymologically this term indicates the foreigner who came from another country and who was unable to make
him/herself understood and expressed him/herself falteringly because s/he did
not know the language of the polis. Historically it points to an
individual who is characterized by blind, devastating violence, by savage
roughness. The barbarian is the one who does not speak the language of the
city-state and also the one who breaks loose with fury. On first view, it is
not easy to understand how this dual interpretation that appears illogical
could exist united in one word. Why ever should one who doesn’t speak our
language be a brutal savage? Why ever would one who resorts to the most
ferocious violence not be able to express him/herself through the same words we
use?
In reality, there
is a profound link between the lack of a common language and inexplicable violent behavior. Within a society, a common language
allows the sides to know each other, to reconcile differences, to find an
arrangement. In the case of a conflict, it allows the adversaries to
distinguish between friends and enemies, limiting the use of force. Without
this possibility of understanding, there is no place for mediation, but only
for uncontrolled violence. Opposed forces can descend to pacts only if they are
able to communicate with each other. In the situation in which they fight, the
possibility for dialogue still places a limit on their violence. It establishes
a threshold beyond which not to go so that future negotiations will not be
nullified. But without this common language, without the concrete possibility
of knowing any thing about the other – the basic premise for discovering the
thing that can harmonize the interests of the antagonists – nothing remains but
to fight to the last drop of blood.
In recognizing the barbaric traits that
characterize many of the most recent social struggles, the analysis of the two
emissaries of the Empire allows a bit of worry over their possible development
to leak out. Behind the formal flattery, the attempt to civilize the
barbarians, to educate them in the language of the polis-Empire with the aim of averting their devastating and, above all, uncontrolled violence, seems obvious. Hardt and Negri are aware that
“Struggles in other parts of the world and even our own struggles seem to be
written in an incomprehensible foreign language”(p. 57), and that this is why
they are barbaric. And they don’t notice any positive sign in this, quite the
opposite.
Not being able to
admit the subversive potentiality of such extraneousness, they prefer to
announce that “these struggles not only fail to communicate to other contexts
but also lack even a local communication, and thus often have a very brief
duration where they are born, burning out in a flash” (p. 54). The incommunicability
of the barbarians – the notorious “autism” of modern insurgents that has caused
so many rivers of ink to flow from the journalistic and sociological rabble –
becomes in the final analysis a dangerous phenomenon not so much for the Empire
as for the barbarians themselves, inasmuch as it would not allow their action
to spread more widely in time and space. But would this be the motive that
moves the two emissaries to support the necessity to “construct a new common
language” (p.57), defining its realization as “an important political task”
(p.57)? Or isn’t the real reason that “Perhaps, precisely because all these
struggles are incommunicable and thus blocked from traveling horizontally in a
cycle, they are forced instead to leap vertically and touch immediately on the
global level” (p. 55), a most dangerous matter since “the more capital extends
its global networks of production and control, the more powerful any singular
point of revolt can be” (p. 58)?
Bringing it down
to earth, if the struggles were not manifest in such an uncontrolled way –
i.e., if they were not as irrecuperable as they are incommunicable – they would
be able to extend themselves on the quantitative level, but would be
qualitatively less meaningful. Here it is possible to ascertain the real
interest of the two emissaries: better to spread struggle at low
conflictuality, the eternal poverty of making demands, than to support
struggles with radical characteristics and high conflictuality. Teaching
barbarians the language of the Empire (which is only able to express itself
through concepts such as state, party, constitution, politics, productivity,
work, democracy and withering away), the two emissaries indeed invite them to
multiply their struggles horizontally, but only because they know that, once
civilized, these struggles would become impoverished vertically. They want to
increase the quantity of struggle, aware that this will occur at the expense of
their quality, in faithful observance of an inflexible law of capitalism.
Let’s take the
concrete examples put forward by Hardt and Negri. If the unification of markets
has overcome every barrier in favor of the free circulation of goods, then it
should also smash every border in favor of a free circulation of workers. Nonetheless,
the “nomadism of the multitude” knows a very precise obstacle: crossing the
borders may indeed be getting easier in some situations, but once one has
arrived at one’s destination, how does one respond to the police who demands
papers? So “global citizenship” is described as “a first element
of a political program for the global multitude” (p. 400). Once every one of us
has documents for residence, i.e., once we are recognized as citizen-subjects
of the Empire, “all should have full rights of citizenship in the country where
they live and work” (p. 400). In fact, it is necessary not to forget that for
the two emissaries, as for the Nazis, it is work that makes one free, and it is
really the access to work that requires a universal constitution: “In effect
this political demand insists in postmodernity on the fundamental modern
constitutional principle that links right and labor, and thus rewards with
citizenship the worker who creates capital” (p. 400). In the battles of all the
irregular workers and undocumented immigrants who work and demand to be
legalized, Hardt and Negri see the just claim for compensation that is due to
the slave who is obedient to the orders of the master. When it is accompanied
by assent, subjection deserves citizenship. What is completely absent in their
outlook is the possibility that the slave might rebel against orders and try to
break the chains that imprison him/her. Certainly identification papers are to
be numbered among these chains. The two emissaries are quite careful not to
consider that there are two fundamentally opposed ways of obtaining freedom of
movement. The first is the one that they hope for, the one that foresees
documents for everyone (even complete with fingerprints*!). The second is the one that they
do not consider, the one that does not foresee any documents. The first
conception requires the modernization of the Empire’s bureaucracy; the second
requires its destruction. Either everything is placed in order before the
police, or we put an end to all orders and all police.
The same discourse
applies to the other war-horse of the two emissaries, that of the social wage
and of the guaranteed income for everyone. “Once citizenship is extended to
all, we could call this guaranteed income a citizenship income due each member
of society” (p. 403), Hardt and Negri propose, in the poorly hidden hope that
the subject will be satisfied by a social reward – owed to them for their mere
consent, quite apart from the activity carried out – and will therefore cease rebelling
as those oppressed by the Empire and put themselves to work as members of society. As opposed to those who continue to think that communism
is a world without money, the two emissaries hold that it
must inevitably take on the form of a waged
world – meaning a
capitalistic world. This absolute inability of theirs to imagine human
existence outside the orbit traced by the imperial institutions is not trivial:
anyone who wants to communicate with the
Empire must learn to speak like the Empire, anyone who speaks like the Empire
ends up thinking like the Empire.
THE INADEQUACY OF THE NO
The conversion of the barbarians
operates on all levels. They must not only learn the language of the Empire;
they must also renounce their violence. But if convincing them to go to school
is relatively easy – it is enough to promise a quantitative leap – what
reasoning can be used to invite those who consider the use of force a virtue to
lay down their swords? Through a game of rhetorical trickery that turns the stainless
myth of the Resistance around. Quoting an antifascist partisan, the two
emissaries recall that “Resistance is born of desertion” (p. 205). Strengthened
by this historical truth, Hardt and Negri maintain that “Whereas in the
disciplinary era sabotage was the fundamental notion of
resistance, in the era of imperial control it may be desertion. Whereas being-against in modernity often meant a direct
and/or dialectical opposition of forces, in post-modernity being-against might
well be most effective in an oblique or diagonal stance. Battles against the
Empire might be won through subtraction and defection. This desertion does not
have a place; it is the evacuation of the places of power” (p.212).
As often as they
display their whole inventory as word manipulators, in this instance, the trick
they use is much too shabby. Resistance is born of desertion, but it is not
desertion. Desertion only consists of a non-participation, a non-collaboration
in the projects of the enemy. Resistance however is direct intervention,
face-to-face conflict with the enemy. At most, one could say that desertion was
a form of passive resistance, while the partisan struggle was a form of active
resistance. Those who become aware of living in an intolerable social
situation, in a world based on the wealth of the few and the misery of the
many, those who no longer want to feel responsible for the horrors committed
every day, can cease to make their contribution to the continuation of the
existent. For example, they can stop going to the polls or acquiring
merchandise from the large multinationals. But however much one may appreciate
the intentions, this choice is completely inadequate since in itself it is not
able to concretely call the social order into question and ends up as a rather
limited gesture of refusal. It pacifies the guilt feelings of the conscience,
but it doesn’t change the surrounding reality. In order to stop the enemy, it
is not enough to refuse to give your service or to abstain from associating
with it. It is necessary to attack it and strike it with the intention of
destroying it.
Supporting
desertion at the expense of sabotage, the two emissaries do nothing more than
support the Empire. Just as Nazism continued to occupy and oppress Italy
despite its deserters, in the same way, the Empire will continue to occupy and
oppress the entire planet in spite of its deserters. All this rhetoric about
the resistance of desertion awkwardly pursues a single aim, that of pacifying
the rage of the subjects by offering them the safety valve of abandonment and
denying the necessity and urgency of the direct attack against the Empire.
Through these charlatans’ subterfuges, the barbarians are invited to take as an
example not the determination of the deserters, which would have led them to
active resistance, but rather the initial behavior, in other words, they are
invited to emulate the gesture for which the deserters became famous: throwing down their arms and refusing to fight.
It is clear that
once Hardt and Negri had used the imperial metaphor, they could not do anything
but await the coming of the “new barbarians”. It is enough that these
barbarians simply cease to be so: yes to a comprehensible language, no to
violence. The latter is no longer useful: on the one hand, “Imperial corruption
is already undermined by the productivity of bodies, by cooperation, and by the
multitude’s designs of productivity. The only event that we are still awaiting
is the construction, or rather the insurgence of a powerful organization” (p.
411); While on the other hand, “Militants resist imperial command in a creative
way. In other words, resistance is linked immediately with a constitutive
investment in the biopolitical realm and to the formation of cooperative
apparatuses of production and community” (p. 413). For fear of being
misunderstood, the two emissaries are forced to explain themselves with a
certain clarity: They do not, in fact, hope for the coming of the barbarian
horde, but rather of a powerful organization of militants! They don’t
appreciate those who struggle furiously, but rather those who work
productively! They don’t demand that one follows one’s passions, but that one
carries out one’s obligations! They don’t desire one to wreak havoc among the
enemies, but to resist creatively!
Hardt and Negri
appreciate the Empire to such a degree, they are so molded by its values,
worshipful of its organization, assimilated to its technology, accustomed to
its language, as to conclude that militancy “knows only an inside, a vital and
ineluctable participation in the set of social structures, with no possibility
of transcending them” (p. 413). Here we are before yet another example of
dialectical acrobatics. While they launch vibrant appeals to the subjects so
that they start off on the road to exodus, at the same time they affirm many
times that within the Empire there is no elsewhere, no outside with respect to
an inside.
But if the Empire
is everywhere, If limits that define its territory no longer exist, where would
this Promised Land toward which to lead the exodus of the “multitude” ever be
found? Does a free zone exist on this planet, a place that remains
uncontaminated by the logic of power and profit? Unfortunately, the world is
One, and it is completely under the domination of the Empire. No substantial
alternatives are permitted within it. At most, it allows us to adapt ourselves
to its arrangements, giving up any existence of our own. This corresponds to
extinguishing us – the quiet life of resignation. At best, it is possible for
us to survive in a way that is less bad, inserting ourselves in any of its
cracks. This is why anyone who desires
to live, that is to determine for herself the content and the form of his days
on this earth, has only one card to play. Before being the indispensable,
preliminary condition of real freedom, the insurrection against the Empire is a
question of dignity.
WITHOUT ANY REASON
Today the barbarians no longer camp
at the gates of the City. They already find themselves inside it, because they
were born in it. There are no longer cold lands of the North or barren steppes
of the East from which to start the invasion. It is necessary to recognize that
the barbarians arise from the ranks of the imperial subjects themselves. In
other words, the barbarians are everywhere. For ears accustomed to the language
of the polis, it is easy to recognize them,
because when they express themselves, they stammer. But there is no need to let
oneself be fooled by the incomprehensible sound of their voices; there is no
need to confuse the one without a language with the one who speaks a different
language.
Many barbarians
really are deprived of a recognizable language, rendered illiterate by the
suppression of their individual awareness – a consequence of the extermination
of meaning carried out by the Empire. If one does not know how
to talk, it is because one does not know what to say, and vice versa. And one does not know what and how to speak because
everything has been banalized, reduced to mere symbol, to appearance. Meaning,
which was considered one of the greatest sources of revolt, a radiant fount of
energy, has been eroded in the course of the past few decades by a whole
company of imperial functionaries (for example, the French structuralist school
so dear to the two emissaries). They have shattered, pulverized and minced it
in every sphere of knowledge. Ideas that expound and incite to transformative
action have been cancelled and replaced by opinions that comment and rivet in
conservative contemplation. Where there was once a jungle full of danger
because it was wild and luxuriant, a desert has been created. And what does one say, what does one do, in the midst of a desert? Deprived
of words with which to express rage for the suffering one has undergone,
deprived of hope with which to overcome the emotional anguish that devastates
daily existence, deprived of desires with which to struggle against
institutional reason, deprived of dreams
toward which to reach in order to sweep away the repetition of the existent,
many subjects become barbaric in action. Once the tongue is paralyzed, the
hands quiver to find relief from frustration. Inhibited from manifesting
itself, the compulsion toward the joy of living is turned on its head, becoming
its opposite, the death instinct. Violence explodes and, being without meaning, manifests itself in a blind and furious manner, against
everything and everyone, overturning every social relationship. Where there is
not a civil war going on, there are the rocks thrown from overpasses or the
murders of parents, friends or neighbors. It is not revolution or even revolt;
it is a generalized slaughter carried out by subjects who have been made
barbaric by the wounds inflicted on their hides every day by a world that is without
meaning because it is forced to have a single meaning. This dreary and
desperate violence annoys the Empire, disturbed in its presumption of
guaranteeing total tranquility, but it is not worried about this. In itself,
this does nothing but feed the demand for greater public order. And yet,
however easily recuperable once it is brought out to the surface, it shows all
the restlessness that stirs in the depths of this society, all the
precariousness of the imperial hold over the circumstances of the modern world.
And yet there are
other barbarians of a different sort. They are barbarians insofar as they are
refractory against the words of command, certainly not insofar as they are
deprived of awareness. If their language seems obscure, irritating, stuttering,
it is because it does not endlessly conjugate the imperial Verb to the
infinitive*. These barbarians are all the ones who deliberately refuse to follow
the institutional itinerary. They have other paths to travel, other worlds to
discover, other existences to live. To the virtuality – understood as
simulation – of technology that originates in sterile laboratories, they oppose
the viruality – understood as possibility – of aspirations that originate in
the palpitations of the heart. In order to give form and substance to these
aspirations, in order to transform them from virtual into real, they must
snatch the time and space necessary for their realization from the Empire by
force. That is to say, they must manage to reach a total rupture with the Empire.
These barbarians
are also violent. But their violence is not blind toward those they strike, but
rather toward imperial reason. These barbarians don’t speak or understand the
language of the polis, and they have no desire to learn
it. They have no use for the social structures of the Empire, the American
constitution, the current means of production, identification papers or the
social wage to which the two emissaries so much adhere. They have nothing to
demand of imperial functionaries and nothing to offer them. The politics of
compromise has failed from the start, not due to a ridiculous ideological
process, but due to their inadequacy to this world. These barbarians only know
that to realize their desires, whatever they are, they must first clear out the
obstacles that they encounter on their path. They have no time to ask
themselves how “capitalism is miraculously healthy, its accumulation more
robust than ever” (p. 270), as the two emissaries comically slow down to do,
perturbed that history refuses to function in compliance with the well-oiled
mechanisms of a machine. The “mystery of capital’s continuing health” (p. 270)
doesn’t manage to rouse the passion of these barbarians as much as the urgency
of its death. This is why they are ready to lay waste to the metropolises –
with their banks, their shopping centers, their police-oriented city planning –
at any moment, individually or collectively, in the light of the sun or in the
dark of the night. If they don’t have a single reason for doing so, it is
because they have all of them.
In opposition to
the discontented subjects who want to become contented subjects, the
possibility of another world does not concern these barbarians. They prefer to
fight because they think that a world absolutely other is possible. They know
that “another world” will be like “another day”, the empty and boring
repetition of what has come before it. But a
world absolutely other
is a completely unknown world to dream, to create, to explore. Having been born
and raised under the imperial yoke, without ever having had the possibility of
experimenting with radically different ways of living it is not possible to
imagine a world absolutely other except in negative terms, as a world without
money, without laws, without work, without technology and without all the
numberless horrors produced by capitalist civilization.
Unable to conceive
of a world without masters to serve, the two emissaries interpret this absence
as a lack. It is their ridiculous belief that the Empire is the destiny of
humanity that causes them to say: “The refusal of work and authority, or really
the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics
[…]. In political terms, too, refusal in itself (of work, authority and voluntary
servitude) leads only to a kind of social suicide. As Spinoza says, if we
simply cut the tyrannical head off the social body, we will be left with the
deformed corpse of a society” (p. 204). The tyrant is the head, the reason that
guides; The subjects are the muscles, the strength that works. Rather than
Spinoza, the two emissaries should have quoted the patricians of ancient Rome,
who informed the plebeians who were on the verge of rebelling that if the
subjects rise up and put the tyrant to death, they commit suicide, because there cannot be life without someone who
commands.
The eternal lie
that maintains all exercise of power finds two fervent followers in Hardt and
Negri, who are available to argue that that the refusal of authority is suicide
and that anarchism is a form of impotence. As has been noted many times and
from many sides, it is really destruction that opens the door to creation; mere
refusal does nothing more than render the ground fertile for a new affirmation.
Contrary to what the two emissaries think, the tyrant – and every power
structure is tyrannical – is not the head of the social body, but rather the
parasite that poisons its organism. Killing it is an act of liberation. The
Parisian revolutionary clubs did not suffer from the beheading of king Louis
XVI, nor did the Russian workers’ councils suffer from the fall of Tsar
Nicholas II. Rather, the liquidation of power, i.e., the insurrectional context
that brought down the ancient customs and released new energies, is what really
allowed their birth and their spread. And the reintroduction of power, in
Jacobin or Bolshevik form, is what really brought about the stalemate and the
ruin of the process of social regeneration, bringing that which is Unknown back
to that which is State*.
Whoever does not
speak with me and like me has nothing to say. Whoever does not act with me and
like me is sick with impotency. Whoever does not live with me and like me
desires to kill herself. This is the teaching that the Empire spreads among its
enemies from the mouths of the two emissaries. But the barbarians are deaf to
such foolish warnings; their ears are sensitive only to the voices that call
them to the assault against the Empire, to making a clean sweep of the
existent. Their fury even inspires terror in many enemies of the Empire who
indeed desire to defeat it, but with good
manners. As civilized
cutthroats, they share the dissent but not the hatred; they understand the
indignation but not the rage; they hurl protests slogans but not war cries;
they are ready to shed saliva but not blood. They too – it is clear – desire
the end of the Empire, but they wait for it to happen spontaneously, as a
natural phenomenon. Pushed by the certainty that the Empire is seriously ill,
its most educated enemies hope that a collapse frees humanity from its
cumbersome presence as soon as possible. Besides, no one can deny that it is
much less dangerous to obtain freedom after the peaceful departure of the
master, like a hereditary fortune, rather than conquering it in battle. This
indisputable observation leads them to sit on the banks of the river waiting to
see the corpses of their enemies pass by carried by the currents.
The barbarian
nature is quite different; it doesn’t know this gentle patience. In fact, the
barbarians are persuaded that it is vain to wait for the death of the Empire,
which above all might not be quite so imminent as its civil enemies hope.
Besides, this all leaves one to assume that at the moment of its collapse the
Empire will bury everything, really everything, under its ruins. Then what is
the purpose of waiting? Isn’t it better to go in search of the enemy and do
everything possible to get rid of it? This barbaric determination rouses
horror. The two emissaries are horrified; according to them the identification
of the enemy is “the first question of political philosophy” (pp. 210-211) and
as such cannot be concerned with barbarians, who in their coarseness are able
at best to move “round in such paradoxical circles” (p. 211).
But the well
brought up enemies of the Empire are also horrified. Accustomed to using up
their days in waiting to be able to start living, they mistake barbaric
immediacy for bloodthirstiness. And how could it be otherwise? They are
completely unable to comprehend what the barbarians are fighting for, since
barbaric language is still incomprehensible to their ears. The cry of the
barbarians is much too infantile for them, their boldness much too gratuitous.
In the face of the barbarians, they feel as powerless as an adult at grips with
roused children. In fact, for the ancient Greeks the barbarian was quite
similar to the child, while in Russian the two concepts are expressed with the
same word (and let’s consider the Latin infans, infant, that literally means not speaking). Well then, the thing that those who don’t speak, the
stammerers, are most reproached for is the lack of seriousness, of
reasonableness, of maturity. For barbarians, as for children, whose nature has
not yet been completely domesticated, freedom does not start with the
elaboration of an ideal program but with the unmistakable din of broken
crockery. This is the thing that raises the protests of those who think, with
Lenin, that extremism is only an “infantile disorder”. Against the senile disorder
of politics, the barbarians affirm that freedom is the most urgent and
terrifying need of human nature. And unbridled freedom makes use of all the
world’s products, of all the objects, using them as playthings.
But the offspring
of the goddess Reason don’t allow for a social transformation that is not based
on the edification of the Public Good. It’s either a question of a return to a
mythical past (the primitivist illusion) or of the fulfillment of a radiant
future (the messianic illusion). As for the barbarians, they love neither
nostalgic sighs nor architectural diplomas. That
which is is not
destroyed in the name of that which was or of that which will be, but in order to finally give life to everything that could be, in its boundless possibilities, here and now. Right now.
TO PUT AN END TO IT
It is useless to try to teach one
who has no tongue how to speak. It is useless to take fright in the face of
guttural sounds and thoughtless acts. It is useless to propose mediation to one
who wants the impossible. It is useless to beg for freedom from one who imposes
slavery. Let’s leave pedagogy to the two emissaries, together with their police
and missionary spirit. May the barbarians break loose. May they sharpen their
swords, may they brandish their battleaxes, may they strike their enemies
without pity. May hatred take the place of tolerance, may fury take the place
of resignation, may outrage take the place of respect. May the barbarian hordes
go to the assault, autonomously, in the way that they determine. And may no
parliament, no credit institution, no supermarket, no barracks, no factory ever
grow again after their passage. In the face of the concrete that rises to
strike the sky and the pollution that fouls it, one can well say with Dejacque
that “It is not the darkness that the Barbarians will bring to the world this
time, it is the light.”
The destruction of
the Empire could hardly assume the customary forms of social revolution, as we
have come to know them from the history books. (the conquest of the Winter
Palace, the popular reaction to a blight, the general wildcat strike).
There are no
longer any noble ideas capable of stirring the great proletarian masses, there
are no longer sweet Utopias ready to be fertilized by their lovers, there are
no longer radical theories that only wait to be put into practice. All this has
been overwhelmed, swept away by the imperial slime. There is only the disgust,
the desperation, the repugnance of dragging our existence through the blood
spilled by power and the mud flung up by obedience. And yet in the midst of
this blood and mud, the will – confused in some and clearer in others – to put
an end to the Empire and its deadly order once and for all can be born.
“And each time the sufferings of the past, with all
the horrors and torments that wracked my body, would be thrown to the wind as
though from a distant age, and I would abandon myself joyfully to dreams of
adventure, beholding with heated imagination a world that I knew not in life but
in desire, a world that no man has known in life but that many of us have known
in dreams. And dreaming, time would fly by, and my body would stand weariness
at bay, and I would redouble my enthusiasm, and become bold, and go out on
reconnaissance at dawn to find out the enemy’s position and…All this in order
to change life, to stamp a different rhythm onto this life of ours; all this
because men could be brothers and I among them; all this because joy that
surges forth even once from our breasts must surge out of the earth…”
—An uncontrollable
of the Iron Column, March 1937, Spain
Anti-copyright, March 2003
Every text, every picture,
every sound that pleases you is yours! Wherever you find it, tke it as yours
without asking permission and do what you want with it.
* This parallels the perspectives of many neo-racists who base their ideology on “culture” and “ethnicity” rather than on skin color and “blood”.
* A lingua franca is a hybrid language of the sort that often develops in places of international commerce – such as port cities – to allow communication.
* An international tax on currency speculation.—translator
* Ya Basta!,
the White Overalls and the Disobedient – all Negrian “radicals” – have carried out this function in a number of
demonstrations in
* The Italian
word,
* A leftist politician, formerly in the Communist Party of Italy, now part of the Left Democratic party, who speaks with every one from White Overalls to fascists.
* In Italian, this word “fabbrica”, usually means “factory”. – translator
* In Italian there is a play on words here – “immondo” is the Italian word for “foul”; “mondo” is the Italian word for “world”.
* In Italian, there is a play on words in this sentence: “excess” is “dismisura” in Italian and “measure” is “misura”, which, according to my dictionary can also mean “limit” or “standard”.
* The Italian state is going to require fingerprints on all new identification documents.
* The Italian phrase is “…coniuga all’ infinito il Verbo imperiale” with a wordplay on “all’infinito” which means both “the infinitive” and “endlessly”.
*In Italian this is a wordplay “riportando ciò che è Ignoto a ciò che è Stato” can also mean “bring the Unknown back to that which has been”. The idea is that if we storm the unknown, the state will be a thing of the past.