hydrarchist writes: "On Wednesday we published the article "Toni Negri -- Terrorism is an Essential Sickness of the System", having found it in French on italy.indymedia.org. The article was attributed to Toni Negri, for reasons which are plain from viewing the original french post. It has been brought to our attention that this article was in fact written by a Juan Domingo, participant in the Yahoo e-group on Toni Negri. Someone saw fit to repost his article with Toni Negri listed in both the subject line, and as author. The text has made its way rapidly around the net, and generated considerable confusion, as is clear from the messages in french which eventually clarified the mistake, which you can find in the comments section. We apologize to our readers and particularly to both Toni Negri and Juan Domingo for any confusion.
For purposes of transparency you can read the article and some correspondence below. There are also some short remarks by Michael Hardt which are verifiably his own!
1. The authors of the attacks were all members of the Arab elites (pilot diplomas, university studies in Germany or the USA). They have not acted in the interests of the deprived at all, irrespective of what they did in their name: like all elites which aspire to become the dominant class, Bin Laden, the Al Qaida network, must acquire the favor of a significant section of the population. For the latter the Koran is not sufficient.
2. It is exactly for this reason that they attacked the centers of American military and economic power. For the Arab masses (not only the Iraqis and Palestinians), they are – for reasons that everyone understands – objects of hate.
3. Doing this, they reckoned upon the American reaction consisting of obliging the Islamic states, even Islamicist (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Emirates) which were playing the ambiguity between Islam and the alliance with the USA to choose their side. This choice is a painful and especially perilous choice for these regimes based on religion, but allied to the USA,. Should they keep their precious exterior ally, they lose the masses, or the reverse.
4. This crisis of legitimacy allows the replacement of a moderate elite by an Islamacist elite that does not call into question the neo-liberal order, nor even American domination (see the declarations of Bin Laden on CNN), but contests the monopoly of power exercised by the oil monarchies. Like the Iranian Islamic revolution that did not pose the question of capitalism at all, Bin Laden and his network want to leverage the masses to get rid of the corrupt monarchies and replace them with a theocratic republic.
5. One must thus not be fooled: if the attacks hit symbols of American power, their aim is not at all to weaken it, amongst other things because there is no longer autonomous American power in the context of globalization. The only stakes in the attack is a regional stake just for the Islamic world: it is a question of determining whom in the future will ensure neo-liberal governance in the region.
6. The perpetrators of the attacks are probably men from the Bin Laden network trained by the CIA and the Pakistani secret services to fight (by terrorist means) the pro-Soviet Afghan regime. They are thus linked to one of their targets: the Pentagon. They obtain their funds from financial speculation and profit from the omni-directional liberalization of capital movements (imposed by the USA on the whole world to finance their public debt and their enormous private debts by means of the financial bubble). They are thus no strangers to either the Twin Towers or Wall St.
7. Bin Laden and Co. are thus creatures, or rather an essential sickness, of the system. In order to fight him, it would have to destroy its own pillars, by controlling the movements of capital and by destroying political and economic alliances that support him (Saudi, Pakistan, the Emirates, the Taliban themselves). Doing so, it would lose a large part of its economic power and military force. To a great degree, risk is the condition of the existence of globalized capitalism (as asserted by Giddens): the maintenance of this regime presupposes not only further misery in the third world and amongst the disfavored classes of the center, but insecurity everywhere. By dint of manufacturing Palestinians all over the planet, we finish by living in the permanent insecurity of the Israelis.
8. The peoples of the entire world have thus been attacked in New York and Washington on September 11th, by an extremist neo-liberal faction. The war smouldering in the four corners of the world has at last globalized itself: Manhattan resembles Ramallah. The faction in power in the USA prepares to draw the political dividends of this state of war after having pocketed the stockmarket dividends, as elsewhere Bin Laden will not go without doing. It has declared a protracted state of war (ten years at least according to Bush) that will make extremely difficult the mobilization of democratic forces that since Seattle express themselves against capitalist globalization.
9. It is necessary at all costs to finish this state of permanent and from now on universal war and to create conditions that permit neither Bush nor Bin Laden to build markets upon peoples in the name of the struggle of good against evil. A movement against violence and tyranny of finance is more and more necessary if we want to defend safety, life and democracy in our whole planet. Globalized capitalism is sick with the violence and the misery it engenders. We must organize the exodus of peoples and create in the resistance itself new social relations if we do not want to go down with it."
