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Rethinking M.the last 3 paragraphs of Hardt and Negri's response to all comments
in the end of the Rethinking Marxism dossier.
"Three fundamental elements constitute the actions of the multitude:
resistance, insurrection, and constituent power, or really, if one does not
want to be so theoretical, micropolitical practices of insubordination and
sabotage, collective instances of revolt, and finally utopian and
alternative projects. These are the capacities of the multitude that are
real and constantly present. Our hypothesis, then, is that in order for the
multitude to act as a subject these three elements must coincide in a
coherent project of counterpower. We need to discover a way that every
micropolitical expression of resistance pushes on all stages of the
revolutionary process; we need to create a situation in which every act of
insubordination is intimately linked to a project of collective revolt and
the creation of a real political alternative. How can this be created,
however, and who will organize it?
The obvious temptation here is to repeat, with regard to the multitude, the
operation that (in his time) Rousseau operated on bourgeois society to make
it into a political body. This is just the temptation, however, that we need
to recognize and avoid, because for us the path leads in the opposite
direction. It is not true that there can be no multiple agent without being
unified. We have to overturn that line of reasoning: the multitude is not
and will never be a singe social body. On the contrary, every body is a
multitude of forces, subjects, and other multitudes. These multitudes assume
power (and thus are capable of exercising counterpower) to the exten that
they are enriched through this common productivity, that they are
transformed through the force of invention they express, that they reveal
and radically remake, through practices of commonality and mixture, their
own multiple bodies. Self-valorization, revolution, and constitution: these
become here the components of the capacity of decision of the multitude - a
multitude of bodies that decides.
How can all this be organized? Or better, how can it adopt an organization
figure? How can we give to these movements of the multitudes of bodies,
which we recognize as real, a power of expression that can be shared? We
still do not know how to respond to these questions. In the future, perhaps,
we will have accumulated enough new experiences of struggle, movement, and
reflection to allow us to address and surpass these difficulties -
constituting not a new body but a multiplicity of bodies that come together,
commonly, in action. We would like that the critiques of our book, _Empire_,
be directed toward this incapacity of ours to give a complete response to
these (and other) questions. We hoped that in writing _Empire_ we would
provide an argument that would stimulate debate. Risking being wrong is
better than remaining silent. Ours is, after all, part of a collective
project of all those who really think that the revolution of this world and
the transformation of human nature are both necessary and possible."
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