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Title: This is Not a Program Author: Tiqqun Date: 2001 Language: en Topics: insurrectionist, communism Source: Scanned from Original on 2013-01-22.
I donât believe that ordinary people think that in the short run there
is any risk of a sudden, violent dissolution of the state, of open civil
war. What is gaining ground instead is the idea of latent civil war, to
borrow a journalistic expression, the idea of a civil war of position
that would strip the state of all legitimacy.â
(Terrorisme et dimocratie, Editions Sociales, 1978)
Once again, blind experimentation, with no protocol or almost none. (We
have been left so little; this may be our chance.) Once again, direct
action, sheer destruction, out-and-out confrontation, the refusal of any
kind of mediation: those who donât refuse to understand will get no
explanation from us. Again, the desire, the plane of consistency of
everything that several decades of counterrevolution have repressed.
Again, all this: autonomy, punk, riot, orgy, but original, mature,
thought out, clear of the petty convolutions of the new.
Through arrogance, âinternational policeâ operations, and communiques
declaring permanent victory, a world presented as the only world
possible, as the crowning achievement of civilization, has finally been
made thoroughly abominable. A world which believed it had completely
insulated itself has discovered evil at its core, among its children. A
world which celebrated a common new year as a change of millennium has
begun to fear for its millennium. A world long settled in the house of
catastrophe now warily grasps that the fall of the âsocialist blocâ
didnât portend its triumph but rather its own ineluctable collapse. A
world gorged with the clamors of the end of history, the American
century, and the failure of communism is now going to have to pay for
its frivolity.
In the present paradoxical situation, this world-that is to say,
essentially, its policeâhas constructed for itself a fitting, and
fittingly extravagant, enemy. It talks of a Black Bloc, of a âtraveling
anarchist circus,â of a vast conspiracy against civilization. One is
reminded of Von Salomonâs Germany in The Outlaws, a Germany obsessed by
the fantasy of a secret organization, the O.C., âwhich spreads like a
cloud loaded with gasâ and to which THEY attribute all the dazzling
confusion of a reality given over to civil war. âA bad conscience tries
to exorcise the power that threatens it. It creates a bogey that it can
make faces at and thinks safety is thereby assured.â That sounds about
right, doesnât it?
Despite the flights of fancy of the imperial police, current events have
no strategic legibility. They have no strategic legibility because if
they did that would imply something common, something minimally common
between us. And that-a common-makes everyone afraid, it makes Bloom4
turn away, it stuns and strikes dumb because it restores something
unequivocal to the very heart of our suspended lives. We have become
accustomed to contracts for everything. We have avoided everything
resembling a pact because a pact cannot be rescinded; it is either
respected or broken. And in the end that is the hardest thing to
understand: that the effect of a negation depends on the positivity of a
common, that our way of saying âIâ determines the force with which we
say âno.â Often we are surprised by the break in historical
transmission, a break arising from the facts that for at least fifty
years no âparentâ has been able to talk about his life to âhisâ
children, to turn his life into history [histoire], a history that isnât
simply a discontinuum colored with pathetic anecdotes. What has in fact
been lost is the ability to establish a communicable relationship
between our history and history as such. At the heart of all this is the
belief that by renouncing every singular existence, by surrendering all
purpose, we might finally get a little peace. Blooms believed that it
was enough to abandon the battlefield for the war to end. But nothing
like that happened. War didnât stop and those who have refused as much
now find themselves a bit more disarmed, a bit more disfigured, than the
rest. This is the source of the resentments that now roil in Bloomsâ
bowls and from which springs the insatiable desire to see heads roll, to
finger the guilty, to secure a kind of general repentance for all of
history past. A redefinition of historical conflict is needed, not
intellectually: vitally.
I say redefinition because a definition of historical conflict precedes
us in which every existence in the pre-imperial period had its part: the
class struggle. That definition no longer holds. It condemns us to
paralysis, bad faith, and empty talk. No war can now be waged, no life
lived, in this straightjacket from another age. To continue the struggle
today, we will have to scrap the notion of class and with it the whole
entourage of certified origins, reassuring sociologisms, identity
prostheses. The notion of class is only good for holding like a little
bedpan the neuroses, separa tion, and perpetual recrimination in which
THEY have taken such morbid delight in France, in every segment of
society, for such a long time. Historical conflict no longer opposes two
massive molar heaps, two classes-the exploited and the exploiters, the
dominant and dominated, managers and workers among which, in each
individual case, one could differentiate. The front line no longer cuts
through the middle of society; it now runs through the middle of each of
us, between what makes us a citizen, our predicates, and all the rest.
It is thus in each of us that war is being waged between imperial
socialization and that which already eludes it. A revolutionary process
can be set in motion from any point of the biopolitical fabric, from any
singular situation, by exposing, even breaking, the line of flight that
traverses it. Insofar as such processes, such ruptures, occur, one plane
of consistency is common to all of them: that of anti-imperial
subversion. âThe generality of the struggle specifically derives from
the system of power itself, from all the forms in which power is
exercised and applied.â We have called this plane of consistency the
Imaginary Party, so that in its very name the artifice of its nominal
and a fortiori p olitical representation is clear. Like every plane of
consistency the Imaginary Party is at once already present and yet to be
built. Building the Party no longer means building a total organization
within which all ethical differences might be set aside for the sake of
a common struggle; today, building the Party means establishing forms-of
life in their difference, intensifying, complicating relations between
them, developing as subtly as possible civil war between us. Because the
most formidable stratagem of Empire lies in its throwing everything that
opposes it into one ugly heap-of âbarbarism,â âsects,â âterrorism,â or
âconflicting extremismsâ fighting against Empire essentially means never
confusing the conservative segments of the Imaginary Party-libertarian
militias, right-wing anarchists, insurrectionary fascists, Qutbist
jihadists, ruralist militants-and its revolutionary-experimental
segments. Building the Party must therefore no longer be thought of in
terms of organization but in terms of circulation. In other words, if
there is still a âproblem of organization,â the problem is organizing
the circulation within the Party. For only the continuation and
intensification of encounters between us can further the process of
ethical polarization, can further the building of the Party.
It is true that a passion for history is generally the fate of bodies
incapable of living the present. Nonetheless, I donât consider it off
topic to return to the aporias of the cycle of struggle initiated in the
early 1960s now that another cycle has begun. In the pages that follow,
numerous references will be made to 1970s Italy. This afraid of going is
not an arbitrary choice. If I werenât afraid of going on too long, I
would easily show how what was then at stake in the starkest and most
brutal terms largely remains so for us, although rodayâs climate is, for
the time being, less extreme. As Guattari wrote in 1978: âRather than
consider Italy as a special case, captivating but all things considered
aberrant, shouldnât we in fact seek to shed light on the other,
apparently more stable, social, political, and economic situations
originating in more secure state power through a reading of the tensions
currently at work in that country?â 1970s Italy remains, in every
respect, the insurrectional moment closest to us. We must start there,
not in order to write the history of a past movement, but to hone the
weapons for the war currently taking place.
Those of us who provisionally operate in France donât have it easy. It
would be absurd to deny that the conditions in which we operate are
determined, and even bloody well determined. Beyond the fanaticism for
separation which sovereign state education has engrained in bodies and
which makes school the shameful utopia hammered into every French skull,
there is this distrust, this impossible to-shake distrust of life, of
everything that exists unapologetically. And there is the retreat from
the world-into art, philosophy, the home, food, spirituality,
critique-as the exclusive and impracticable line of flight on which the
thickening flows of local mortification feed. An umbilical retreat that
calls for the omnipresence of the French state, that despotic
schoolmaster which now seems even to govern âcitizenâ protests. Thus the
great din of spineless, crippled, and twisted French minds, which never
stop whirling round within themselves, every second feeling more
threatened sensing that something might wake them from their complacent
misery.
Nearly everywhere in the world debilitated bodies have some historical
icon of resentment on which to ding, some proud fascistoid movement that
has decked out in grand style the coat of arms of the reaction.
Nothing doing in France. French conservatism has never had any style,
because it is a bourgeois conservatism, a gut conservatism. That it has
finally risen to the rank of pathological reflexivity changes nothing.
It isnât driven by its love for a dying world, but by its terror of
experimentation, of life, of life-experimentation. This conservatism,
the ethical substratum of specifically French bodies, takes precedence
over any kind of political position, over any kind of discourse. It
establishes the existential continuity, a declared asâ much as hidden
continuity, that ensures that Bove, the 17^(th) arrondissement
bourgeois, the pencil pusher of the Enc yclopedie des Nuisances, and the
provincial notable all belong to the same party. It matters little,
then, that the bodies in question voice reservations about the existing
order; the same passion for origins, forests, pastures, and village life
is currently on display in opposition to worldwide financial
speculation, and tomorrow it will stifle even the smallest movement for
revolutionary deterritorialization. Regardless of where, those who speak
solely from the gur exhale the same smell of shit.
Of course, France wouldnât be the country of world citizenism (no doubt
in a not-too-distant future Le Monde Diplomatique will be translated
into more languages than Capital), the ridiculous epicenter of phobic
opposition that claims to challenge the Market in the name of the State,
had THEY not managed to make themselves so utterly impervious to all
that is politically actual, and particularly impervious to 1970s Italy.
From Paris to Porto Alegre, in country after country, the global
expansion of ATTAC bears witness to this Bloomesque craze for quitting
the world.
â77 wasnât like â68. â68 was anti-establishment, â77 was radically
alternative. This is why the âofficialâ version portrays â68 as good and
â77 as bad; in fact, â68 was co-opted whereas â77 was annihilated. This
is why â77, unlike â68, could never make for an easy object of
celebration.â
(Nanni Balestrini, Primo Moroni, Lâorda dâoro)
On several occasions over the course of the 19705 the insurrectionary
situation in Italy threatened to spread to France. It would last more
than ten years and THEY would finally put an end to it with th arrest of
more than 4,000 people. First, there were the wildcat strikes during the
âHot Autumnâ (1969), which Empire quashed in the Piazza Fontana bombing
massacre. The French, whose âworking class took up the red flag of
proletarian revolution from the studentsâ delicate handsâ only in order
to sign the Grenelle Accords, couldnât believe that a movement
originating in the universities could reach all the way to the
factories. With all the bitterness of their abstract relationship with
the working class, they felt deeply offended because their May came out
sullied as a result. So they called the Italian situation âcreeping
May.â
Ten years later, at a time when we were already happy to celebrate the
memory of the French May and at a time when its most resolute actors had
already quietly found jobs within Republican institutions, new rumblings
again came from Italy. These were more obscure, both because pacified
French minds were already at a loss to understand much about a war in
which they had, nevertheless, been engaged and because contradictory
rumors sometimes mentioned prison revolts, sometimes an armed
counterculture, sometimes the Red Brigades (BR), among all the other
things that were a bit too physical for THEM to understand in France. We
pricked up our ears, just out of curiosity, then we turned back to our
petty concerns, telling ourselves that those Italians sure were naive to
continue the revolt when we had already moved on to commemoration.
THEY settled back into denunciations of the gulag, the âcrimes of
communism,â and other delights of the âNew Philosophy.â THEY thereby
avoided seeing that the Italians were revolting against what May â68 had
become, for example, in France. Grasping that the movement in Italy
âchallenged the profs who gloried in their May-â68 past, because they
were in reality the most fervent champions of social- democratic
standardizationâ (Tutto Citta 77)-that surely would have given the
French an unpleasant taste of immediate history. Honor intact, THEY
therefore became all the more certain of a âcreeping May,â thanks to
which THEY could pack away the Movement of â77 with the souvenirs of
another age, a movement from which everything is no less still to come.
Kojeve, who was unmatched in cutting to the heart of the matter, offered
a nice turn of phrase to put the French May to rest. During a meeting at
the OECD a few days before he died of a heart attack, he observed of the
âeventsâ: âThere were no deaths. Nothing happened.â Naturally, a bit
more was needed to inter Italyâs creeping May. Then another Hegelian
surfaced who had acquired no less a reputation than the first but
through different means. He said: âListen, listen, nothing happened in
Italy. Just some dead-enders manipulated by the state who wanted to
terrorize the population by kidnapping some politicians and killing some
judges. As you can see for yourselves, nothing exceptional.â In this
way, thanks to Guy Debordâs shrewd intervention, on this side of the
Alps we have never known that something happened in Italy in the 1970s.
To this day, French luminaries have accordingly confined themselves to
platonic speculations concerning the manipulation of the BR by this or
that state service and the Piazza Fontana massacre. If Debord was an
execrable middleman for all that was explosive in the Italian situation,
he nonetheless introduced France to the favorite sport of Italian
journalism: retrology. For the Italians, retrology-a discipline whose
first axiom might be âthe truth is elsewhereâ-refers to this paranoid
game of mirrors played by those who no longer believe in any event, in
any vital phenomenon, and who, consequently, that is, as a consequence
of their illness, must always imagine someone or some group hidden
behind what happens-the P2 Lodge, the CIA, Mossad, or even they
themselves . The winner is the one who has given his little playmates
the best reasons to doubt reality.
It is thus easier to understand why the French speak of a âcreeping Mayâ
when it comes to Italy. have the proud, public May, the state May.
In Paris May 68 has served as the symbol of â60s and 70s world political
antagonism to the exact extent that the reality of this antagonism lies
elsewhere.
No effort was spared, however, in transmitting to the French a bit of
the Italian insurrection; there were A Thousand Plateaus and Molecular
Revolution, there were Autonomy and the âsquatâ movement, but nothing
had enough firepower to break through the wall of lies of the French
spirit. Nothing that THEY can claim not to have foreseen. Instead, THEY
prefer to chatter on about the Republic, Education, Social Security,
Culture, Modernity and Social Relations, Suburban Unrest, Philosophy,
and the Public Sector.
And this is still what THEY chatter on about just as the imperial
services resurrect Italyâs âstrategy of tension.â Clearly, there is an
elephant missing from the glassworks. Someone to state the obvious, to
come out with it somewhat coarsely and once and for a even if it means
smashing up the place a bit.
Here I would like to speak to the âcomrades,â among others, to those
with whom I can share the party. I am a little fed up with the
comfortable theoretical backwardness of the French ultra-left. I am fed
up with hearing the same fake debates with their rhetorical sub-Marxism:
spontaneity or organization, communism or anarchism, the human community
or unruly individuality. There are still Bordigists, Maoists, and
councilists in France. Not to mention the periodic Trotskyist revivals
and Situationist folklore.
What was happening to the movement was clear: the union and the PCI came
down on us like the police, like f ascists. It was clear then that there
was an irreparable divide between them and us. It was clear from then on
that the PCI would no longer be entitled to speak within the movement.â
(A witness to the dashes at the University of Rome on February 17, 1977,
quoted in LâOnia dâaro.)
In his final book, Mario Tronti observes that âthe workersâ movement
wasnât defeated by capitalism; the workersâ movement was defeated by
democracy.â But democracy didnât defeat the workersâ movement as if the
workersâ movement were a kind of foreign creature: it defeated it as its
internal limit. The working class was only temporarily the privileged
site of the proletariat, of the proletariat as âa class of civil society
which is not a class of civil society,â as âan estate that is the
dissolution of all estatesâ (Marx). Starting in the interwar period the
proletariat began to definitively surpass the working class to the point
that the most advanced segments of the Imaginary Party began to
recognize in it, in its fundamental laborism, in its supposed âvalues,â
in its classist self-satisfaction, in short: in its class-being, the
equivalent of the class-being of the bourgeoisie, its most formidable
enemy and the most powerful vector for integration into the society of
Capital. From then on the Imaginary Party would be the form in which the
proletariat would appear.
In all Western countries â68 marks the meeting and collision of the old
workersâ movement-fundamentally socialist and senescent-with the first
constituted segments of the Imaginary Party. When two bodies collide the
direction that results depends on the inertia and mass of each. The same
thing happened in every country. Where the workersâ movement was still
strong, as in Italy and France, the meager detachments of the Imaginary
Party slipped into its motheaten forms, aping its language and methods.
We then see the revival of militant practices of the âThird
Internationalâ type; it ushered in groupuscular hysteria and
neutralization via political abstraction. It was the short-lived triumph
of Maoism and Trotskyism in France (the GP, PC-MLF, UJC-ML, JCR, Parti
des Travailleurs, etc.), of the partitini (Lotta continua, Avanguardia
Operaia, MLS, Potere Operaio, Manifesto) and other extra-parliamentary
groups in Italy. Where the workersâ movement had long been eliminated,
as in the United States or Germany, there was an immediate move from
student revolt to armed struggle, a move during which the use of the
Imaginary Partyâs practices and tactics was often veiled in socialist or
even Third-Worldist rhetoric. Hence, in Germany, the Movement 2 June,
the Red Army Faction (RAF), the Rote Zellen, and in the United States,
the Black Panther Party, the Weather Underground, the Diggers or the
Manson Family, were the emblems of a prodigious movement of internal
defection.
The particularity of Italy in this context is that the Imaginary Party,
although merged overwhelmingly with the socialist structures of the
partitini, still found the strength to destroy them. Four years after
â68 had revealed the âcrisis of hegemony of the workersâ movementâ (R.
Rossanda), the cauldron finally boiled over in 1973, leading to the
first significant uprising of the Imaginary Party in a key area of
Empire: the Movement of â77.
The workersâ movement was beaten by democracy, that is, nothing to come
out of this tradition can counter the new configuration of hostilities.
On the contrary. When the host is is no longer a portion of society- the
bourgeoisie-but the society as such, the society as power, and when,
therefore, we find ourselves fighting not against classical tyrannies
but against biopolitical democracies, we know that every weapon, just
like every strategy, must be reinvented. The hostis is Empire, and, for
Empire, we are the Imaginary Party.
Youâre not from the castle, youâre not from the village, youâre nothing.
(Franz Kafka, The Castle)
The revolutionary element is the proletariat, the rabble. The
proletariat is not a class. As the Germans of the nineteenth century
still recognized, es gibt Pabel in allen Standen, there is a rabble in
all classes. âPoverty in itself does not reduce people to a rabble; a
rabble is created only by the disposition associated with poverty, by
inward rebellion against the rich, against society, the government, etc.
It also follows that those who are dependent on contingency become
frivolous and lazy, like the lazzaroni of Naples, for exampleâ (Hegel,
Elements ofthe Philosophy ofRight, addition to § 244). Every time that
it has attempted to define itself as a class, the proletariat has lost
itself, taken the dominant class, the bourgeoisie, for a model. As a
non-class, the proletariat is not the opposite of the bourgeoisie but of
the petite bourgeoisie. Whereas the petty bourgeois believes himself
capable of mastering the game of society, persuaded that he will come
through all right individually, the proletariat knows that its fate
hangs on its cooperating with its own kind, that it needs the latter in
order to persist in being, in short: that its individual existence is
fundamentally collective. In other words: the proletariat is that which
experiences itself as a form-of life. It is communist or nothing.
In every age the form in which the proletariat appears is redefined
according to the overall configuration of hostilities. The most
regrettable confus ion in this regard concerns the âworking class.â As
such, the working class has always been hostile to the revolutionary
movement, to communism. It wasnât socialist by chance but socialist in
essence. If we except the plebian elements, that is, specifically, what
it was unable to recognize as a worker, the workersâ movement has
throughout its existence coincided with the progressive elements of
capitalism. From February 1848 to the Commune and the autogestionary
utopias of the 1970s, it has only ever demanded, for its most radical
elements, the right of the working class to manage Capital for itself In
reality, the proletariat has only ever worked for the expansion of the
human basis of Capital. The so-called âsocialistâ regimes have carried
out its program perfectly: integrating everyone into capitalist
relations of production and incorporating each person into the process
of valorization. Their collapse, conversely, has but shown the
impossibility of a total capitalist system. It has thus been by way of
social struggles and not against them that Capital has taken hold of
humanity, that humanity has in fact reappropriated it to become,
strictly speaking, the people of Capital. The workersâ movement was
therefore essentially a social movement, and it is as such that it has
survived. In May 2001 a little tyrant from the Italian Tute Bianche came
to explain to the young imbeciles of âSocialisme par en basâ how to
speak convincingly to power, how to sneak through the backdoor into the
sticky game of classical politics. He explained the Tute bianche
âapproachâ like this: âTo us, the Tute Bianche symbolize all the
subjects that have been absent from institutional politics, all those
who arenât represented: illegal immigrants, young people, precarious
workers, drug addicts, the homeless, the excluded. What we want is to
give a voice to people who have none.â Todayâs social movement, with its
neo-trade- unionists, its informal activists, its spectacular spokesmen,
its nebulous Stalinism, and its micro-politicians, is in this the heir
of the workersâ movement: it uses the inclusion of workers in the
process of reformed valorization as a bargaining chip with the
conservative agents of Capital. In exchange for doubtful institutional
recognition-doubtful because of the logical impossibility of
representing the unrepresentable, the proletariat- the workersâ movement
and then the social movement have promised Capital to maintain social
peace. When, after Gothenburg, one of its sterile muses Susan George
denounces the ârioters â whose methods âare as undemocratic as the
institutions they mean to protestâ; when in Genoa Tute Bianche deliver
up to the cops supposed members of nonexistent âBlack Blocsâ-which they
paradoxically decry as being in infiltrated by the very same policeâthe
representatives of the social movement have never failed to remind me of
the reaction of the Italian workersâ party when confronted with the
Movement of â77. âThe popular masses ,â reads the report Paolo Bufalini
presented to the PCI Central Committee on April 18, 1978, âall citizens
of democratic and civic feeling will continue their efforts to provide
valuable assistance to the forces of order and to the officers and
soldiers involved in the fight against terrorism. The priority is to
isolate, both politically and morally, the red brigatisti, as well as
their sympathizers and supporters , in order to strip them of any kind
of alibi, of all external cooperation and support. They must be
completely cut off and left like fish out of water, which is no small
task when you consider how many people must be involved in these
criminal activities.â Because no one is more interested than the social
movement in maintaining order, it was, is, and will be on the
avant-garde of the war waged against the proletariat. From now on:
against the Imaginary Party.
The history of Italyâs creeping May demonstrates better than anything
how the workersâ movement has always been the vehicle for
Capital-Utopia, a âcommunity of work in which there are only producers,
with no idle or homeless, and which would manage capital without crises
and without inequality, capital having in this way become The Societyâ
(Philippe Riviale, La ballade du temps passe). Contrary to what the
phrase suggests, creeping May was in no way a continuous process
stretched out over ten years; it was rather an often cacophonous chorus
of local revolutionary processes, moving, town by town, according to a
distinctive rhythm marked by interruptions and resumptions, stases and
accelerations, and each one reacting to the other. On common consensus a
decisive rupture occurred , however, when the PCI adopted its politics
of Historic Compromise in 1973. The preceding period, from 1968 to 1973,
had been marked by the struggle between the PCI and extra-parliamentary
groups for hegemony over the new social antagonisms. Elsewhere this had
led to the success of the âsecondâ or ânewâ left. The focus at the time
was on what THEY called a âpolitical solution,â that is, the
transformation of concrete struggles into alternative, more inclusive
management of the capitalist state; struggles which the PCI at first
considered favorably, and even encouraged here and there, since they
helped enhance its contractual power. But starting in 1972 the new cycle
of struggle began to run out of steam worldwide. It then became urgent
for the PCI to cash in on a potential for social agitation
whose price was in free-fall. Moreover, the lesson of Chili- where a
socialist party whose rise to power in short order ended in a remote-
controlled imperial putsch-tended to dissuade the PCl from going it
alone in its bid for pol iti cal hegemony. That was when the PCl laid
out the terms for the Historic Compromise.
With the workersâ party joining the party of order and the subsequent
end of that sphere of representation, all political mediation
disappeared. The Movement was isolated, forced to develop its own
position from a non-class-based perspective; the extra-parliamentary
groups and their phraseology was abruptly dropped; under the paradoxical
effect of the watchword âdes agregazioneâ the Imaginary Party began to
form a plane of consistency. At each new stage of the revolutionary
process it logically came up against the most resolute of its
adversaries, the PCl. Thus the most intense confrontations of the
Movement of â77- whether in Bologna or at the University of Rome between
Autonomists and the Metropolitan Indians on one side and the head of the
CGILâs, Luciano Lamaâs, stewards and the police on the other-would pit
the Imaginary Party against the workersâ party; and later on it was
naturally the âred judgesâ who launched the âanti-terroristâ legal
offensive and its series of police sweeps in 1979â1980. This is where
one must look to find the origin of the â citizensâ discourse currently
promulgated in France as well as its offensive strategic function; this
is the context in which it must be assessed. âIt is utterly clear,â
wrote PCl members at the time, âthat the terrorists and militants of
subversion intend to thwart the workers â progressive march towards
political leadership of the country, to attack the strategy of an
expansion of democracy and the participation of the popular masses, to
challenge the decisions of the working class in order to drag it into
direct confrontation and, tragically, into ripping up the democratic
fabric of society. If large n umbers mobilize in this country, if
democratic forces intensify their unified action, if the government can
give firm direction to state institutions that have been appropriately
reformed and made more effective, terrorism and subversion will be
isolated and vanquished and democracy will flourish in a thoroughly
modernized stateâ (Terrorisme et democratie). The call to denounce this
or that person as a terrorist was thus the call to differentiate oneself
from oneself as capable of violence, to project far from oneself oneâs
latent warlike tendency, to introduce in oneself the economic
disjunction that makes us a political subject, a citizen. It was
therefore in still very relevant terms that Giorgio Amendola, then a PCl
senior deputy, in due course attacked the Movement of â77: âOnly those
who seek the destruction of the republican state gain from spreading
panic and preaching revolt.â Thatâs it exactly.
âThe points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and
space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in
a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments
of life, certain types of behavior. Are there no great radical ruptures,
massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more often one is
dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing
cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and
effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting
them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in
their bodies and minds. Just as the network o f power relations ends by
forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions,
without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of
resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities. And
it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance
that makes a revolution possible.â
(Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1)
Empire is the kind of domination that knows no Outside, that has gone so
far as to sacrifice itself as the Same in order to rid itself of the
Other. Empire excludes nothing, substantially; it only precludes that
anything present itself as other, that anything escape the general
equivalence. The Imaginary Party is therefore nothing, specifically; it
is everything that impedes, undermines, defies, ruins equivalence .
Whether it speaks with the voice of a Putin, Bush, or Jiang Zemin ,
Empire will thus always label its hostis a âcriminal,â a âterrorist,â a
âmonster. â If need be, it will itself secretly organize âterroristâ and
âmonstrousâ acts which it will then ascribe to the hostis-who remembers
Boris Yeltsinâs edifying rhetorical flights following the attacks in
Moscow carried out by his own special police, especially his speech to
the Russian people during which the buffoon called for a fight against
Chechen terrorism, âagainst a domestic enemy that has no conscience, no
pity, and no honor,â that âhas no face, no nationality, or religionâ? On
the other hand, Empire will never recognize its own military operations
as acts of war, but only as âpeace-keepingâ operations, â international
policingâ efforts.
Before â68 brought the dialectic swaggering back- the dialectic as the
way of thinking final reintegration Marcuse attempted to think through
this curious configuration of conflict. In a speech from 1966 entitled
âThe Concept of Negation in the Dialectic,â Marcuse attacks the
Hegelo-Marxist propensity to introduce negation within an antagonistic
whole, whether between two classes, between the socialist camp and the
capitalist camp, or between Capital and labor. To this tendency he
opposes a contradiction, a negation that comes from outside. He observes
that the staging of social conflict within a totality, which had been
the defining characteristic of the workersâ movement, is but the
mechanism by which THEY freeze out the event, prevent the actual
negation from occurring from the outside. âThe outside about which I
have spoken is not to be understood mechanistically in the spatial sense
but, on the contrary, as the qualitative difference which overcomes the
existing antitheses inside the antagonistic partial whole [ ...] and
which is not reducible to these antitheses. [ ...] [T]he force of
negation is concentrated in no one class. Politically and morally,
rationally and instinctively, it is a chaotic, anarchistic opposition:
the refusal to join and play a part, the disgust at all prosperity, the
compulsion to protest. It is a feeble, unorganized opposition which
nonetheless rests on motives and purposes which stand in irreconcilable
contradiction to the existing whole.â
The new configuration of conflict came out of the interwar period. On
the one hand, there was Soviet membership in the League of Nations, the
Franco-Soviet Pact, the fuled strategy of the Comintern, the masses
joining with Nazism, fascism, and Francoism; in short: the workersâ
betrayal of their call to revolution. On the other hand, there was the
explosion of social subversion coming from outside the workersâ
movement-from surrealism, Spanish anarchism, or the American hobos.
Suddenly, the revolutionary movement and the workersâ movement were no
longer identical, revealing the Imaginary Party as an excess relative to
the latter. The motto, âclass against class,â which from 1926 had become
hegemonic, only reveals its latent content if we note that it
pre-dominated exactly at the moment when all classes to disintegrate
under the effect of the crisis. âClass against classâ actually means
âclasses against the non-classâ; it belies the determination to
reabsorb, to liquidate this evermore massive remainder, this floating,
socially unaccountable element that threatens to undermine every
substantialist interpretation of society, be it bourgeois or Marxist.
Indeed, Stalinism must first of all be interpreted as the hardening of
the workersâ movement as it is effectively surpassed by the Imaginary
Party.
One group, the Cercle Communiste Democratique, which united around
[Boris] Souvarine in France in the 1930s, tried to redefine historical
conflict. It succeeded by half in so far as it identified the two
principal pitfalls of Marxism: economism and eschatology. The last issue
of its revue La Critique Sociale noted the following failure: âNeither
the liberal bourgeoisie nor the unconscious proletariat have shown
themselves able to absorb into their political organizations the forces
of the young and declasse elements, whose increasingly energetic
interventions have accelerated the course of eventsâ (La Critique
Sociale, no. 11, March 1934). As is hardly surprising in a country where
the custom is to dilure everything-especially politics-in literature,
the first rough theory of the Imaginary Party comes from the pen of
Bataille in the revueâs last issue. The article is entitled âThe
Psychological Structure of Fascism.â For Bataille, the Imaginary Party
stands in opposition to homogeneous society. âProduction is the basis of
social homogeneity. Homogeneous society is productive society, namely,
useful society. Every useless element is excluded, not from all of
society, but from its homogeneous part. In this part, each element must
be useful to another without the homogeneous activity ever being able to
attain the form of activity valid in itself. A useful activity has a
common measure with another useful activity, but not with activity for
itself. The common measure, the foundation of social homogeneity and of
the activity arising from it, is money, namely the calculable equivalent
of the different products of collective activity.â Bataille here points
to the present-day composition of the world into a continuous
biopolitical fabric, which alone accounts for the fundamental solidarity
between democratic and totalitarian regimes, for their infinite
reciprocal reversibility. The Imaginary Party is what consequently
manifests itself as heterogeneous to biopolitical formation. âThe very
term heterogeneous indicates that it concerns elements which are
impossible to assimilate; this impossibility which has a fundamental
impact on social assimilation, likewise has an impact on scientific
assimilation. [ ...] Violence, excess, delirium, madness characterize
heterogeneous elements to varying degrees: active, as persons or mobs,
they result from breaking the laws of social homogeneity. [ ...] In
summary, compared to everyday life, heterogeneous existence can be
represented as something other, as incommensurate, by charging these
words with the positive value they have in affective experience. [ .. ]
This proletariat cannot actually be limited to itself: it is in fact
only a point of concentration for every dissociated social element that
has been banished to heterogeneity.â Batailleâs error, which would
plague all the work of the College of Sociology and Adphale, was to
continue to conceive of the Imaginary Party as a part of society, to
consider society as a cosmos, as a whole capable of being represented as
beyond oneself, and to view oneself from this perspective, i.e., from
the point of view of representation. All the ambiguity of Batailleâs
positions with regard to fascism stems from his attachment to these
used-up dialectics, to all that prevented him from understanding that
under Empire the negation comes from the outside, that it does not occur
as a heterogeneity with respect to the homogeneous, but as a
heterogeneity in itself, as a heterogeneity between forms-of-life
playing within their difference. In other words, the Imaginary Party can
never be individuated as a subject, a body, a thing, or a substance, nor
even as a set of subjects, bodies, things, and substances, but only as
the event of all of these things. The Imaginary Party is not
substantially a remainder of the social whole, but the fact of this
remainder, the fact that there is a remainder, that the represented
always exceeds its representation, that over which power is exercised
always eludes it. Here lies the dialectic- our condolences.
There is no ârevolutionary identity.â Under Empire, it is instead
non-identity, the fact of constantly betraying the predicates that THEY
hang on us, that is revolutionary. For a long time now, there have only
been ârevolutionary subjectsâ for power. To become neither particular
nor general, to become imperceptible, to conspire, means to distinguish
between our presence and what we are for representation, in order to
play with representation. To the exact extent that Empire becomes
unified, that the new configuration of conflict acquires an objective
character, there is a strategic necessity to know what we are for
Empire, although accepting ourselves as such, as a âBlack Bloc,â an
âImaginary Party,â or something else, would be the end of us. For
Empire, the Imaginary Party is but the form of pure singularity. From
the point of view of representation, singularity as such is the complete
abstraction, the empty identity of the here and now. Likewise, from the
point of view of the homogeneous, the Imaginary Party is simply âthe
heterogeneous,â the purely unrepresentable. If we donât want to do the
policeâs work for them, we will therefore have to be careful not to
think we can do any more than indicate the Imaginary Party when it
occurs-for instance: describe it, identify it, localize it within the
territory or mark it out as a segment of âthe society.â The Imaginary
Party is not one of the terms of social contradiction but the fact that
contradiction exists at all, the inassimilable alterity of the
determined faced with the omnivorous universality of Empire. And it is
only for Empire, that is, for representation, that the Imaginary Party
exists as such, that is, as negative. Dressing up what is hostile to the
system of representation in the guise of the ânegative,â âprotest,â the
ârebel,â is simply a tactic that the system uses to bring within its
plane of inconsistency the positivity it lacks-even at the risk of
confrontation. The cardinal error of all subversion therefore lies in
the obsession with negativity, in an attachment to the power of negation
as if that were its most characteristic feature, whereas it is precisely
in the power of negation that subversion is the most dependent on
Empire, and on Empireâs recognition of it. Here militancy like
militarism finds its only desirable solution: that of ignoring our
positivity, which is our whole strength, which is all that we have to
offer, from the point of view representation, that is, as derisory. And,
of course, for Empire, every determination is a negation.
Foucault, too, made a decisive contribution to the theory of the
Imaginary Party: his interviews dealing with the plebs. Foucault evokes
the theme for the first time in a âDiscussion with Maoistsâ on âpopular
justiceâ in 1972. Criticizing the Maoist practice of popular courts, he
reminds us that all popular revolts since the Middles Ages have been
anti-judicial, that the constitution of peopleâs courts during the
French Revolution occurred at precisely the moment when the bourgeoisie
regained control, and, finally, that the tribunal form, by reintroducing
a neutral authority between the people and its enemies, reincorporated
the principle of the state in the struggle against the state. âWhen we
talk about courts weâre talking about a place where the struggle between
contending forces is willy-nilly suspended.â According to Foucault, the
function of justice following the Middles Ages was to separate the
proletarianized plebs-the plebs integrated as a proletariat, included by
way of their exclusion-from the non-proletarianized plebs, from the
plebs proper. By isolating within the mass of the poor the âcriminals,â
the âviolent,â the âinsane,â the âvagrants,â the âperverted,â the
âgangsters,â the âunderworld,â THEY would not only remove what was for
power the most dangerous segment of the population, that which was
always ready for armed, Insurrectionary action, THEY would also enable
themselves to turn the peopleâs most offensive elements against the
people themselves. This would be the permanent threat of âeither you go
to prison or you join the army,â âeither you go to prison or you leave
for the colonies,â âeither you go to prison or you join the police,â
etc. All the effort of the workersâ movement to distinguish between
honest, strike-ready workers from âagitators,â ârioters,â and other
âuncontrollable elementsâ is an extension of this opposition between the
plebs and the proletariat. The same logic is at work today when
gangsters become security guards: in order to neutralize the Imaginary
Party by playing one of its parts off the others.
Foucault would clarify the notion of the plebs four years later in
another interview. âNo doubt it would be mistaken to conceive the
âplebsâ as the permanent ground of history, the final objective of all
subjections, the ever smoldering center of all revolts. The âplebsâ no
doubt has no sociological reality. But there is indeed always something,
in the social body, in classes, in groups, in individuals themselves,
that in some way escapes power relations, something that is by no means
the more or less docile or recalcitrant raw material, but rather the
centrifugal movement, the inverse energy, the breakaway part. No doubt
âtheâ plebs does not exist, but there is, as it were, a certain plebeian
quality or aspect (ae laâplebe). There is plebs in bodies, in souls, in
individuals, in the proletariat, in the bourgeoisie, but with an
extension of forms, of energies, of various irreducibilities. This part
of plebs is less exterior to power relations than their limit, their
underside, their counter stroke, that which responds to every advance of
power with a movement of disengagement. Hence it provides the motivation
for every new development of networks of power. [ ... ] This point of
view of the plebs, the point of view of the underside and limit of
power, is thus indispensable for an analysis of its apparatuses.â
But we owe the most decisive contribution to the theory of the Imaginary
Party neither to a French writer nor to a French philosopher but rather
to the militants of the Red Brigades Renato Curcio and Alberto
Franceschini. In 1982, in a supplement to Corrispondenza internazionale,
the little volume Gocce di sole nelle cita degli spettri [Drops of sun
in the city of specters] was published. As disagreements between
Morettiâs Red Brigades and their then-imprisoned âhistorical bossesâ
turned to open war, Curcio and Franceschini drew up the program of the
short-lived Guerrilla Party, the third offshoot of the BR to form
following its implosion, alongside the Walter Alasia Column and the
BR-Combatant Communist Party. In the wake of the Movement of â77,
remarking how much they were spoken about in the conventional Third
International rhetoric of the revolution, they broke with the classical
paradigm of production, taking the latter out of the factory and
extending it to the Total Factory of the metropolis where semiotic
production, that is, a linguistic paradigm of production, prevailed.
âRethought as a totalizing system (differentiated into private,
interdependent, functional subsystems or fields of autonomous
decision-making and auto-regulating capacity) , that is, as a
modular-corporate system, the computerized metropolis appears as a vast,
barely disguised penal colony, in which each social system, just as each
individual moves in passageways strictly differentiated and regulated by
the whole. A penal colony made transparent by the computer networks that
keep it under constant surveillance. In this model, metropolitan social
space-time mimics the schema of a predictable universe in precarious
equilibrium, unbothered by its forced tranquility, subdivided into
modular compartments inside of which each worker labors, encapsulated
within a specific collective role-like a goldfish in a bowl. A universe
regulated by apparatuses of selective retroaction dedicated to the
neutralization of all disruptions to the programs system established by
the executive. [...] Given the absurd and unsustainable communication in
which everyone is inevitably caught, as if ensnared by the paradoxical
injunction-that in order to âspeakâ one must give up âcommunicating,â
that to âcommunicateâ one must give up speaking!- it isnât surprising
that antagonistic communication strategies emerge which refuse the
authorized language of power; it isnât surprising that the
significations produced through domination are rejected and countered
with new decentralized productions. Unauthorized, illegitimate
productions, but organically connected to life, and which consequently
constellate and constitute the secret underground network of resistance
and self-defense against the computerized aggression of the insane
idioms of the state. [...] Therein lies the main barrier separating
social revolution from its enemies: the former takes in isolated
resisters and schizo- metropolitan flows to a communicational territory
antagonistic to that which led to their devastation and revolt. [...] In
the ideology of control, an at-risk dividual is already synonymous with
a âpotential terrorist madman,â with a fragment of high-explosive social
material. That is why these dividuals are tracked down, spied on, and
followed with the discretion and tireless rigor of the hunter by the
great eye and the great ear. For the same reason they are made the
target of an intense, intimidating semiotic bombardment that sustains
the scraps of official ideology. [ ...] This is how the metropolis
achieves its specificity as a concentration camp which, in order to
deflect the incessant social antagonism it generates, Simultaneously
integrates and manipulates the artifices of seduction and fantasies of
fear. Artifices and fantasies that assume the central function of the
nervous system of the dominant culture and reconfigure the metropolis
into an immense psychiatric Lager-the most total o f total
institutions-a labyrinthine network of High Security Quarters, areas of
continuous control, loony bins, prisoner containers, reserves for
volunteer metropolitan slaves, bunkered zones for demented fetishes.
[...] In the metropolis, perpetrating violence against the necrotropic
fetishes of Capital is humanityâs greatest possible conscious act
because it is through this social practice that the proletariat
constructsâby appropriating the vital productive process-its knowledge
and its memory, that is, its social power. [ ...] Destroying the old
world through revolutionary transgression and bringing forth from this
destruction the surprising and multiple constellations of new social
relations are simultaneous processes that ate nonetheless of two
distinct kinds. [ ...] Those responsible for creating the imaginary
world prohibit themselves from communicating real life, turning real
life into madness; they fabricate angels of seduction and little
monsters of fear in order to display them to the miserable rabble
through the networks and circuits that transmit the sanctioned
hallucination. [ ...] To rise up from the âregistered location,â to take
to the stage to wreck the fetishistic performance: that is what the
metropolitan guerrillas of new communication have set out to do from the
start. [ ...] Within the complex metropolitan revolutionary process, the
party cannot have an exclusively or eminently political form. [ ...] Nor
can the party take on an exclusively combative form. The âpower of armsâ
does not imply, as the militarists believe, absolute power, because
absolute power is the power-knowledge that reunifies social practices. [
... ] A guerrilla party means: the party of power is party of knowledge.
[ ... ] The guerrilla party is the agent through which proletarian
knowledge-power achieves its maximum exteriorization and invisibility. [
... ] This means that the greater the partyâs invisibility, the more it
opposes global imperialist counterrevolution, the greater its
visibility, the more it becomes an internal part of the proletariat,
that is to say, the more it communicates with the proletariat. [ ... ]
In this way, the guerrilla party is the party of transgressive social
communication.â
âIn large part it was these tendencies and not the violence of the
struggles that made the young people of â77 incomprehensible to the
traditional elements of the workersâ movement.â
(Paolo Virno, âDo You Remember Counterrevolution?â)
Genoa is sacked by masked-bodied reayas, a new squat opens, workers
threaten to blow up their factory, a suburb explodes, its inhabitants
attack police stations and the nearest lines of communication, the end
of a protest turns nasty, a field of transgenic corn is mowed down
during the night. Whatever discourse describes these
acts-Marxist-Leninist, reformist, Islamist, anarchist, socialist,
ecologist, or stupidly critical-they are events of the Imaginary Party.
It matters little if the discourses are fit from the first capital
letter to the last period to the mould of meaning of Western
metaphysics, for from the start these acts speak a different language.
For us, the aim is of course to combine with the event as gesture the
event as language. This is what Autonomia Operaia achieved in Italy in
the 1970s. Autonomia was never one movement, even if THEY described it
at the time as âthe Movement.â Autonomiaâs space was the plane of
consistency where a large number of singular destinies flowed together,
intersected, aggregated, and disaggregated. Bringing these destinies
together under the term âAutonomiaâ serves purely as a signifying
device, a misleading convention. The big misunderstanding here is that
autonomy wasnât the predicate demanded by subjects-what dreary,
democratic drivel if the whole thing had been about demanding oneâs
autonomy as a subject-but by becomings [devenirsl . Autonomia thus has
innumerable birthdates, is but a succession of opening acts, like so
many acts of secession. It is, therefore, workersâ autonomy, the
autonomy of the unionsâ rank and file, of the rank and file that
ransacked the headquarters of a moderate union at Piazza Statuto in
Turin in 1962. But it is also workersâ autonomy with regard to their
role as workers: the refusal to work, sabotage, wildcat strikes,
absenteeism, their declared estrangement from the conditions of their
exploitation, from the capitalist whole. It is womenâs autonomy: the
refusal of domestic work, the refusal to silently and submissively
reproduce the masculine workforce, self-consciousness, making themselves
heard, putting an end to pointless affective intercourse; womenâs
autonomy, therefore, from their role as women and from patriarchal
civilization. It is the autonomy of young people, of the unemployed, of
the marginal, who refuse their role as outcasts, who are no longer
willing to keep their mouths shut, who impose themselves on the
political scene, demand a guaranteed income, create an armed struggle in
order to be paid to sit on their asses. But it is also the autonomy of
militants from the figure of the militant, from the partinini, and from
the logic of the groupuscule, from a conception of action always
deferred-deferred until later in existence. Contrary to what the
sociologizing half wits-always hungry for profitable reductions may lead
one to believe, the remarkable fact here is not the affirmation of ânew
subjects,â whether political, social, or productive, young people, women
, the unemployed, or homosexuals, but rather their violent, practical,
active desubjectivation, the rejection and betrayal of the role that has
been assigned to them as subjects. What the different becomings of
Autonomia have in common is their call for a movement of separation from
society, from the whole. This secession is not the assertion of a static
difference, of an essential alterity, a new entry on the balance sheet
of identities managed by Empire, but a flight, a line of flight. At the
time, separation was written Separlazione.
The movement of internal desertion, of brutal subtraction, of
ever-renewed flight, this chronic irreducibility to the world of
domination-this is what Empire fears. âThe only way to develop our
culture and to live our lives, as far as we are concerned, is by being
absent,â proclaimed the Maoist-Dadaist fanzine Zut in its October 76
issue. That we could become absent to its provocations, indifferent to
its values, that we might not respond to its stimuli- that is the
permanent nightmare of cybernetic domination, âto which power responds
by criminalizing all foreign behavior and oneâs rejection of capitalâ
(Vogliamo Tutto 10, summer â76). Autonomy therefore means: desertion,
deserting family, deserting the office, deserting school, deserting all
supervision, deserting menâs, womenâs, and the citizenâs roles,
deserting all the shitty relations in which THEY believe us to be
held-endless desertion. With every new direction that we give to our
movement, the essential thing is to increase our power [puissance] , to
always follow the line of increasing power in order to strengthen the
force of our deterritorialization, to make sure that THEY wonât be
stopping us anytime soon. In all this, what we have most to fear, what
we have most to betray, is all those who are watching us, who are
tracking us, following us from afar, thinking of one way or another to
capitalize the energy expended by our flight: all the managers, all the
maniacs of reterritorialization. Some are on the side of Empire of
course : the trend-setters feeding on the cadaver of our inventions, the
hip capitalists, and other dismal scum. But some can also be found on
our side. In 1970s Italy they were the Operaists, the great unifiers of
Autonomia Organizzata, which succeeded in âbureaucratizing the concept
of âautonomy â itself â (Neglazione, 1976). They will always try to make
ONE movement out of our movements in order to s peak in its name,
indulging in their favorite game: political ventriloquism. In the 1960s
and 1970s the Operaists thus spent all their time repatriating in the
terms and behavior of the workersâ movement what in fact outstripped
them on all sides. Taking as their starting point the ethical
estrangement from work expressing itself overwhelmingly among workers
recently emigrated from southern Italy, they theorized workersâ
autonomy-against the unions and the bureaucrats of the classical
workersâ movement-whose spontaneous meta-bureaucrats they were hoping to
become; and this, without having to climb the hierarchical ladder of a
classical union: a meta-syndicalism. Hence the treatment they reserved
for the plebian elements of the working class, their refusal to allow
the workers to become something other than workers, their obliviousness
to the fact that the autonomy asserting itself wasnât workersâ autonomy
but autonomy from the worker identity. They subsequently treated
âwomen,â âthe unemployed,â âyoung people,â âthe marginal,â in short,
âthe autonomous,â all in the same way. Incapable of any familiarity with
themselves let alone with any world, they desperately sought to
transform a plane of consistency, the s pace of Autonomia, into an
organization-a combatant organization, if possible-that would make them
the last-chance interlocutors of a moribund power. Naturally, we owe the
most remarkable and most popular travesty of the Movement of â77 to an
Operaist theoretician, Asor Rosa: the so-called âtheory of two
societies.â According to him, we were supposed to have witnessed a dash
between two societies, that of workers with job security, on the one
hand, and, on the other, that of workers without ( young people,
precarious workers, the unemployed, the marginal, etc.). Even if the
theory has the virtue of breaking with the very thing that every
socialism and, therefore, every left look to preserve (even if it takes
a massacre to do it) , namely, the fiction of societyâs ultimate unity,
it neglects. ( 1) that the âfirst societyâ no longer exists, having
already begun a process of continuous implosion; (2) that the Imaginary
Party, which is being constructed as the ethical fabric following the
implosion, is in no way one, in any case, in no way capable of being
unified into a new isolable whole: a second society. This is exactly the
move that Negri now atavistically reproduces when he calls a singular
multitude something whose essence is, in his own words, a multiplicity.
The theoretical con game will never be as pathetic as its underlying
goal, which is to pass oneself off as the organic intellectual of a new
spectacularly unified subject.
For the Operaists autonomy was, therefore, part and parcel an autonomy
of class, an autonomy of a new social subject. Over the twenty years of
Operaist activity this axiom was maintained thanks to the convenient
notion of class composition. As circumstances and short-sighted
political calculations dictated, this or that new sociological category
would be included in âclass composition,â and, on the pretext of a study
of labor, one would reasonably change sides. When the workers got tired
of fighting, the death of the âmass-workerâ would be decreed and his
role of global insurgent would be replaced with that of the âsocial
worker,â that is, with more or less anyone. Eventually we would end up
discovering revolutionary virtues at Benetton, in the little
Berlusconian entrepreneurs of the Italian North-East (cf. Des
entrerprises pas comme les autres) and even, if need be, in the Northern
League.
Throughout âcreepingâ May autonomy was nothing more than this
incoercible movement of flight, this staccato of ruptures, in particular
ruptures with the workersâ movement. Even Negri acknowledges as much:
âThe bitter polemic that opened in â68 between the revolutionary
movement and the official workersâ movement turned into an irreversible
rupture in â77,â he says. Operaism, the outmoded because avant-garde
consciousness of the Movement, would never tire of reapproriating this
rupture, of interpreting it in terms of the workersâ movement. In
Operaism, just like in the practices of the BR, we find less an attack
on capitalism than a covetous struggle with the leadership of the most
powerful communist party in the West, the PCI, a struggle whose prize
was power OVER the workers. âWe could only talk politics by way of
Leninism. As long as a different class composition wasnât in the offing,
we found ourselves in a situation that many innovators have found
themselves in: that of having to explain the new with an old language,â
Negri complains in an interview from 1980. It was therefore under cover
of orthodox Marxism, under the protection of a rhetorical fidelity to
the workersâ movement, that the false consciousness of the movement came
of age. There were voices, like those of Gatti Selvaggi, that spoke out
against this sleight of hand: âWe are against the âmythâ of the working
class because it is first of all harmful to the working class. Operaism
and populism only serve the millennial aim of using the âmassesâ as a
pawn in the dirty games of powerâ (no. 1, December 1974). But the fraud
was too flagrant not to work. And, in fact, it worked.
Given the fundamental provincialism of French opposition movements, what
happened thirty years ago in Italy isnât just historical anecdote; on
the contrary: we still havenât addressed the problems the Italian
autonomists faced at the time. Given the circumstances, the move from
struggles over places of work to struggles over territory; the
recomposition of the ethical fabric on the basis of secession; the
reappropriation of the means to live, to struggle, and to communicate
among ourselves form a horizon that remains unreachable as long as the
existential prerequisite of Separlazione goes unacknowledged.
Separlazione means: we have nothing to do with this world. We have
nothing to say to it nor anything to make it understand. Of acts of
destruction, of sabotage: we have no reason to follow them up with an
explanation duly guided by human Reason. We are not working for a
better, alternative world to come, but in virtue of what we have already
confirmed through experimentation, in virtue of the radical
irreconcilability between Empire and this experimentation, of which war
is a part. And when, in response to this massive critique, reasonable
people, legislators, technocrats, those in power ask, âBut what do you
really want?â our response is, âWe arenât citizens. We will never adopt
your point of view of the whole, your management point of view. We
refuse to play the game, that is it. It is not our job to tell you which
sauce to cook us with.â The main source of the paralysis from which we
must break free is the utopia of the human community, the perspective of
a final, universal reconciliation. Even Negri, at the time of Domination
and Sabotage, took this step, the step outside socialism: âI donât see
the history of class consciousness as Lukacs does, as a fated, integral
recomposition, but rather as a moment of intensively implanting myself
in my own separation. I am other, other is the movement of collective
praxis of which I am a part. I participate in an other workersâ
movement. Of course I know how much criticism speaking this way may
provoke from the point of view of the Marxist tradition. I have the
impression, as far as I am concerned, of holding myself at the extreme
signifying limit of a political discourse on class. [ ...] I therefore
have to accept radical difference as the methodical condition of
subversion, of the project of proletarian self-valorization. And my
relationship with the historical totality? With the totality of the
system? Here we get to the second consequence of the assertion: my
relationship with the totality of capitalist development, with the
totality of historical development, is secure only through the force of
destructuration determined by the movement, through the total sabotage
of the history of capital undertaken by the movement. [...] I define
myself by separating myself from the totality, and I define the totality
as other than myself, as a network extending over the continuity of
historical sabotage undertaken by the class.â Naturally, there is no
more an âother workersâ movementâ than there is a âsecond society.â On
the other hand, there are the incisive becomings of the Imaginary Party,
and their autonomy.
âThe most yielding thing in the world will overcome the most rigid.â
(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching)
The first campaign against Empire failed. The RAFâS attack on the
âimperialist system,â the BRâS on the SIM (Stato Imperialista delle
Multinazionali), and so many other guerrilla groups have been easily
suppressed. The failure was not one of this or that militant
organization, of this or that ârevolutionary subject,â but the failure
of a conception of war, of a conception of war that could not be
reproduced beyond the sphere of organizations because it itself was
already a re production. With the exception of certain RAF texts or the
Movement 2 June, most documents from the âarmed struggleâ are written in
this ossified, used-up, borrowed language that one way or another smells
of Third International kitsch. As if the point was to dissuade anyone
from joining.
After twenty years of counterrevolution, the second act in the
anti-imperialist struggle has now begun. Until now, the collapse of the
socialist bloc and the social-democratic conversion of the last remnants
of the workersâ movement have definitively freed our party from any of
the socialist inclinations it still may have had. Indeed, the
obsolescence of the old conceptions of struggle first became obvious
with the disappearance of the struggle itself, then with the
âanti-globalization movementâ of today, with the higher-order parody of
former militant practices.
The return of war requires a new conception of warfare. We must invent a
form of war such that the defeat of Empire no longer obliges suicide,
but rather to recognize ourselves as living, as more and more ALIVE.
Our starting point is not fundamentally different from that of the RAP
when it observes: âthe system has taken up all of the free time people
had. To their physical exploitation in the factory is now added the
exploitation of their feelings and thoughts, wishes, and utopian dreams
[ ...] through mass consumption and the mass media. [ ...] The system
has managed, in the metropolises, to drag the masses so far down into
its own dirt that they seem to have largely lost any sense of the
oppressive and exploitative nature of their situation [ ...] SO that for
a car, a pair of jeans, life insurance, and a loan, they will easily
accept any outrage on the part of the system. In fact, they can no
longer imagine or wish for anything beyond a car, a vacation, and a
tiled bathroom.â The unique thing about Empire is that it has expanded
its colonization over the whole of existence and over all that exists.
It is not only that Capital has enlarged its human base, but it has also
deepened the moorings of its jurisdiction. Better still, on the basis of
a final disintegration of society and its subjects, Empire now intends
to recreate an ethical fabric, of which the hipsters, with their modular
neighborhoods, their modular media, codes, food, and ideas, are both the
guinea pigs and the avant-garde. And this is why, from the East Village
to Oberkampf by way of Prenzlauer Berg, the hip phenomenon has so
quickly had such worldwide reach.
It is on this total terrain, the ethical terrain of forms-of-life, that
the war against Empire is currently being played out. It is a war of
annihilation. Contrary to the thinking of the BR, for whom the explicit
purpose of the Moro kidnapping was the armed partyâs recognition by the
state, Empire is not the enemy. Empire is no more than the hostile
environment opposing us at every turn. We are engaged in a struggle over
the recomposition of an ethical fabric. This recomposition can be seen
throughout the territory, in the process of progressive hipification of
formerly secessionist sites, in the uninterrupted extension of chains of
apparatuses. Here the classical, abstract conception of war, one
culminating in a total confrontation in which war would finally reunite
with its essence, is obsolete. War can no longer be discounted as an
isolable moment of our existence, a moment of decisive confrontation;
from now on our very existence, every as pect of it, is war. That means
that the first movement of this war is reappropriation. Reappropriation
of the means of livingand-struggling. Reappropriation, therefore, of
space: the squat, the occupation or communization of private spaces.
Reappropriation of the common: the constitution of autonomous languages,
syntaxes, means of communication, of an autonomous culture-stripping the
transmission of experience from the hands of the state. Reappropriation
of violence: the communization of combat techniques, the formation of
selfdefense forces, arms. Finally, reappropriation of basic survival:
the distribution of medical power-knowledge, of theft and expropriation
techniques, the progressive organization of an autonomous supply
network.
Empire is well-armed to fight the two types of secession it recognizes:
secession âfrom aboveâ through golden ghettos-the secession, for
example, of global finance from the âreal economyâ or of the imperial
hyperbourgeoisie from the rest of the biopolitical fabric-and secession
âfrom belowâ through âno-go areasâ-housing projects, inner cities, and
shantytowns. Whenever one or the other threatens its meta-stable
equilibrium, Empire need only play one against the other: the civilized
modernity of the trendy against the retrograde barbarism of the poor, or
the demands for social cohesion and equality against the inveterate
egotism of the rich. âOne aims to impart political coherence to a social
and spatial entity in order to avoid all risk of secession by
territories inhabited either by those excluded from the socio-economic
network or by the winners of the global economic dynamic. [ ... ]
Avoiding all forms of secession means finding the means to reconcile the
demands of the new social class and the demands of those excluded from
the economic network whose spatial concentration is such that it induces
deviant behavior.â These are the theories peddled by the advisers of
Empire-in this case, Cynthia Ghorra-Gobin in Ies Etats-Unis entre local
et mondial. That said, Empire is powerless to prevent the exodus, the
secession, we are working towards precisely because the latterâs
territory is not only physical, but total. Sharing a technique, the turn
of a phrase, a certain configuration of space suffices to activate our
plane of consistency. Therein lies our strength: in a secession that
cannot be recorded on the maps of Empire, because it is a secession
neither from above nor from below, but a secession through the middle.
What we are simply getting at here is the constitution of war machines.
By war machines should be understood a certain coincidence between
living and struggling, a coincidence that is never given without
simultaneously requiring its construction. Because each time one of
these terms ends up separated, however it happens, from the other, the
war machine degenerates, derails. If the moment oflrving is
unilateralized, it becomes a ghetto. Proofs of this are the grim
quagmires of the âalternative,â whose specific task is to market the
Same in the guise of difference. Most occupied social centers in
Germany, Italy, or Spain clearly show how simulated exteriority from
Empire provides a precious tool in capitalist valorization. âThe ghetto,
the apologia of âdifference,â the privilege accorded to moral and
introspective questions, the tendency to form a separate society that
forgoes attacks on the capitalist machine, on the âsocial factoryâ:
wouldnât all this be a result of the approximate and rhapsodic
âtheoriesâ of Valcarenghi [head of the countercultural publication Re
Nudo] and company? And isnât it strange that they call us a âsubcultureâ
just as all their flowery; nonviolent crap has started to be
undermined?â The Senza Tregua autonomists were writing this already in
1976. On the other hand, if the moment of struggle is hypostatized, the
war machine degenerates into an army. All militant formations, all
terrible communities are war machines that have survived their own
extinction in this petrified form. The introduction to the collection of
Autonomia texts It diritto allâodio [The Right to Hate] published in
1977 already pointed to this excess of the war machine with regard to
its acts of war: âTracing the chronology of this hybrid and, in many
regards, contradictory subject that materialized in the sphere of
Autonomia, I find myself reducing the movement to a sum of events
whereas the reality of its becoming war-machine asserted itself only in
the transformation that the subject effectuated concentrically around
each moment of effective confrontation.â
There is no war machine except in movement, even hindered, even
imperceptible movement, in movement following its propensity for
increasing power. Movement insures that the power struggles traversing
it never settle into power relations. We can win our war, that is, our
war will continue, increase our power, provided that the confrontation
is always subordinated to our positivity: never strike beyond oneâs
positivity, such is the vital principle of every war machine. Each space
conquered from Empire, from its hostile environment, must correspond to
our capacity to fill it, to configure it, to inhabit it. Nothing is
worse than a victory one doesnât know what to do with. In essence, then,
ours will be a silent war; it will be evasive, avoid direct
confrontation, declare little. In so doing it will impose its own
temporality. Just as we are identified we will give the notice to
disperse, never allowing ourselves to be suppressed, already reuniting
in some unsuspected place. The location makes no difference since every
local attack is henceforth an attack against Empire-that is the only
worthwhile lesson to come out from the Zapatista farce. The important
thing is never to lose the initiative, never let a hostile temporality
impose itself. And above all: never forget that our strike capacity is
linked to how well-armed we are only by virtue of our constitutive
positivity.
âI steer clear of those who expectfote, dreams, a riot to provide them
with a way to escape their weakness. They are too much like those who in
the past relied on God to save their wasted lives.â
(Georges Bataille)
It is commonly acknowledged that the Movement of â77 was defeated
because it was incapable, notably during the Bologna conference, of
relating in any significant way to its offensive strength, to its
âviolence.â In Empireâs fight against subversion, its entire strategy
consists in isolating the most âviolentâ âpunks,â the âout of control,â
the âautonomous,â âterrorists,â etc.-from the rest of the population-
and every year this is again proven true. Contrary to the police view of
the world, it must be said that there is in fact no problem with armed
struggle: no consequential struggle has ever been waged without arms.
There is no problem with armed struggle except for the state, which
wants to conserve its monopoly over legitimate armed force. On the other
hand, there is indeed the question of the use of arms. When in March
â77, 100,000 people protested in Rome, 1 0,000 of whom were armed and,
at the end of day long confrontations, not one policeman was hurt
although a massacre would have been easy, we can better appreciate the
difference between being armed and using arms. Being armed is part of
the power struggle, the refusal to remain abjectly at the mercy of the
police, a way of assuming our legitimate impunity. Now that that is
cleared up, there remains the question of our relationship with
violence, a relationship whose general lack of consideration impedes the
progress of anti-imperial subversion.
Every war machine is by nature a society, a society without a state; but
under Empire, given its obsidional status, another determination has to
be added. It is a society of a particular kind: a warrior society.
Although each existence is at its core essentially a war and each will
know how to engage in confrontation when the time comes, a minority of
beings must take war as the exclusive aim of their existence. These are
the warriors. Henceforth the war machine will have to defend itself not
only from hostile attacks, but also from the threat of the warrior
minority breaking off from it, composing a caste, a dominant class,
forming an embryonic state and, by turning the offensive resources at
its disposal into the means of oppression, taking power. To us,
establishing a central relationship with violence only means
establishing a central relationship with the warrior minority.
Interestingly, it was in a text from 1977, the last by Clastres, The
Sorrows of the Savage warrior, that such a relationship was sketched out
for the first time. It was perhaps necessary that all the propaganda
about classical virility had to fade before such an undertaking could be
made.
Contrary to what THEY have told us, the warrior is not a figure of
plenitude, and certainly not of virile plenitude. The warrior is a
figure of amputation. The warrior is a being who feels he exists only
through combat, through confrontation with the Other, a being who is
unable to obtain for himself the feeling of existing. In the end,
nothing is sadder than the sight of a form-of-life that, in every
situation, expects hand-to-hand combat to remedy its absence from itself
But nothing is more moving, either; because this absence from self is
not a simple lack, a lack of familiarity with oneself, but rather a
positivity. The warrior is in fact driven by a desire, and perhaps one
sole desire: the desire to disappear. The warrior no longer wants to be,
but wants his disappearance to have a certain style. He wants to
humanize his vocation for death. That is why he never really manages to
mix with the rest of humankind: they are spontaneously wary of his
movement toward Nothingness. In their admiration for the warrior can be
measured the distance they impose between him and them. The warrior is
thus condemned to be alone. This leaves him greatly dissatisfied,
dissatisfied because he is unable to belong to any community other than
the false community, the terrible community, of warriors who have only
their solitude in common. Prestige, recognition, glory are less the
prerogative of the warrior than the only form of relationship compatible
with his solitude. His solitude is at once his salvation and his
damnation.
The warrior is a figure of anxiety and devastation. Because he isnât
present, is only for-death, his immanence has become miserable, and he
knows it. He has never gotten used to the world, so he has no attachment
to it; he awaits its end. But there is also a tenderness, even a
gentleness about the warrior, which is this silence, this half-presence.
If he isnât present, it is often because otherwise he would only drag
those around him into the abyss. That is how the warrior loves: by
preserving others from the death he has at heart. Instead of the company
of others, he thus often prefers to be alone, and this more out of
kindness than disgust. Or else he joins the grief-stricken pack of
warriors who watch each other slide one by one towards death. Because
such is their inclination.
In a sense, the society to which the warrior belongs cannot help but
distrust him. It doesnât exclude him nor really include him; it excludes
him through its inclusion and includes him through its exclusion. The
ground of their mutual understanding is recognition. In according him
prestige society keeps the warrior at a distance, attaching itself to
him and by the same token condemning him. â For each exploit
accomplished,â writes Clastres, âthe warrior and society render the same
j udgment: the warrior says, Thatâs good, but I can do more, increase my
glory: Society says, Thatâs good, but you should do more, obtain our
recognition of a superior prestige: In other words, as much by his own
personality (glory above all else) as by his total dependence on the
tribe (who else could confer glory?), the warrior finds himself, volens
nolens, the prisoner of a logic that relentlessly makes him want to do a
little more. Lacking this, society would quickly forget his past
exploits and the glory they procured for him. The warrior only exists in
war; he is devoted as such to actionâ and, therefore, in short order, to
death. If the warrior is in this way dominated, alienated from society,
âthe existence in a given society of an organized group of
âprofessionalâ warriors tends to transform the permanent state of war
(the general situation of the primitive society) into actual permanent
war (the situation specific to warrior societies). Such a
transformation, pushed to the limit, would bring about considerable
sociological consequences since by affecting the very structure of
society it would alter its undivided being. The power to decide on
matters of war and peace (an absolutely essential power) would in effect
no longer belong to society as such, but indeed to the brotherhood of
warriors, which would place its private interest before the collective
interest of society, making its particular point of view the general
point of view of the tribe. [ ...] First a group seeking prestige, the
warlike community would then transform itself into a pressure group in
order to push society into accepting the intensification of war.â
The subversive counter-society must, we must recognize the prestige
connected to the exploits of every warrior, of every combatant
organization. We must admire the courage of any feat of arms, the
technical perfection of this or that exploit, of a kidnapping, of an
assassination, of every successful armed action. We must appreciate the
audacity of this or that prison attack meant to liberate comrades. We
must do all this specifically in order to protect ourselves from
warriors, in order to condemn them to death. âSuch is the defense
mechanism that primitive society erects to ward off the risk that the
warrior, as such, presents: the life of the undivided social body for
the death of the warrior. Tribal law becomes clear here: primitive
society is, in its being, a society-for-war; it is at the same time, and
for the same reasons, a society against the warrior.â There will be no
doubt of our grief.
The Italian Movementâs relationship with its armed minority was marked
by this same ambivalence throughout the 1970s. The fear was that the
minority would break off into an autonomous military force. And that is
exactly what the State with its âstrategy of tension,â was aiming at. By
artificially raising the military presence in the conflict, by
criminalizing political protest, by forcing the members of militant
organizations underground, it wanted to cut the minority off from the
Movement and in so doing to make it as hated within the Movement as the
state already was. The idea was to liquidate the Movement as a war
machine by compelling it to take as its exclusive objective war with the
state. The watchword of the PCI secretary general, Berlinguer, in
1978-âYou are either with the Italian state or with the BRâ â which
above all meant âeither with the Italian state or with the Brigadist
stateâ-sums up the apparatus by which Empire crushed the Movement, and
which it is now exhuming in order to prevent the return of
anti-capitalist struggle.
âBut how many of there are you? I mean ... of us, the group.â
âWho knows. One day there are two of us, the next twenty. And sometimes
when we meet, there are a hundred thousand.â
(Cesare Battisti, Lâultimo paro [The Last Shot])
In 1970s Italy two subversive strategies coexisted: that of militant
organizations and that of Autonomia. This is an oversimplification. It
is obvious, for example, that in the sale case of the BR, one can
distinguish between the âfirst BR,â those of Curcio and Franceschini-who
were âinvisible to power, but present for the movementâ; who were
implanted in factories where they kept the loudmouth bosses quiet,
kneecapped scabs, burned cars, kidnapped managers; who only wanted to
be, in their words, âthe highest point of the movementâ -and those of
Moretti, more distinctly Stalinist, who went completely, professionally,
underground, and who, having become invisible to the movement as much as
to themselves, launched an âattack on the heart of the stateâ on the
abstract stage of classical politics and ended up just as cut off from
any ethical reality. It would therefore be possible to argue that the
most famous of the BRâS actions, Moroâs kidnapping, his incarceration in
a âprison of the people,â where he was judged by a âproletarian court,â
so perfectly imitated the procedures of the state not to be, already,
the exploit of a degenerate militarized BR, which was no longer what it
once was, no longer looked anything like the first BR. If we forget
these potential subtleties, we see that there is a strategic axiom
common to the BR, the RAF, the NAP, Prima Linea (PL), and, in fact, to
all combatant organizations, and that is to oppose Empire as a subject,
a collective, revolutionary subject. It entails not only calling for
acts of war, but above all forcing its members to eventually go
underground and in so doing to sever themselves from the ethical fabric
of the Movement, from its life as a war machine. A former PL member,
surrounded by calls for his surrender, offered some worthwhile
observations: âDuring the Movement of â77, the BR understood nothing of
what was happening. The ones who had been working as moles for years
suddenly saw thousands of young people doing whatever they wanted. As
for Prima Linea, the movement had had influence, but paradoxically
nothing remained of it, whereas the BR recuperated the remnants when the
movement died out. In fact, the armed groups never knew how to get in
synch with the existing movements. They reproduced a kind of alternative
mechanism, a kind of silent infiltration, and finally, a virulent
critique. And when the movement disappeared, the disillusioned leaders
were gathered up and launched into the heights of Italian politics.
[...] This was especially the case after Mora. Before, the organization
was instead run with this somewhat irrational spirit of transgression of
the Movement of â77. We werenât modern-day Don Juans, but the prevailing
behavior was âunauthorized.â Then little by little the influence of the
BR changed. They had their grand, model romance, the passion between
Renato Curcio and Margherita Cagol. [...] With militarism-a certain
conception of militarism-life itself is organized as it is in the army.
The analogy with the military struck me; this formal camaraderie infused
with reassuring optimism which feeds a certain kind of competitiveness:
whoever told the best joke and kept the troopsâ spirits up the best won.
With-just as in the army-the gradual elimination of the shy and
depressed ones of the group. There is no place for them, because they
are immediately considered a weight on the regimentâs morale. It is a
typical military deformity: seeking in the exuberant and noisy existence
of a gang a form of security that substitutes for an inner life. So,
unconsciously, you have to marginalize those who might weigh things down
with perhaps a morose but no doubt more sincere mood, in any case, a
mood that must be a lot closer to what the noisiest must deep down be
feeling inside. With a cult of virility as the resultâ (Liberation,
October 13â14, 1980). If we leave aside the profound ill will behind
these remarks, the account confirms two mechanisms specific to every
political group that is constituted as a subject, as an entity separated
from the plane of consistency on which it depends: (1) It takes on all
the features of a terrible community. (2) It finds itself projected into
the realm of representation, into the sphere of classical politics,
which alone shares with it its same degree of separation and
spectrality. The subject-subject confrontation with the state
necessarily follows, as an abstract rivalry, as the staging of an in
vitro civil war; and finally one ends up attributing to the enemy a
heart it doesnât have. One attributes to the enemy precisely that
substance which one is on the point of losing.
The other strategy; not of war but of diffuse guerilla warfare, is the
defining characteristic of Autonomia. It alone is capable of bringing
down Empire. This doesnât mean curling up into a compact subject in
order to confront the state, but disseminating oneself in a multiplicity
of foci, like so many rifts in the capitalist whole. Automonia was less
a collection of radio stations, bands, weapons, celebrations, riots, and
squats, than a certain intensity in the circulation of bodies between
all these points. Thus Autonomia didnât exclude the existence of other
organizations within it, even if they held ridiculous neo-Leninist
pretentions: each organization found a place within the empty
architecture through which-as circumstances evolved-the flows of the
Movement passed. As soon as the Imaginary Party becomes a secessionist
ethical fabric the very possibility of instrumentalizing the Movement by
way of its organizations, and a fortiori the very possibility of its
infiltration, vanishes: rather, the organizations themselves will
inevitably be subsumed by the Movement as simple points on its plane of
consistency. Unlike combatant organizations, Autonomia was based on
indistinction, informality, a semi-secrecy appropriate to conspiratorial
practice. War acts were anonymous, that is, signed with fake names, a
different one each time, in any case, unattributable, soluble in the sea
of Autonomia. They were like so many marks etched in the half-light, and
as such forming a denser and more formidable offensive than the armed
propaganda campaigns of combatant organizations. Every act signed
itself, claimed responsibility for itself through its particular how,
through its specific meaning in situation, allowing one instantly to
discern the extreme-right attack, the state massacre of subversive
activities. This strategy, although never articulated by Autonomia, is
based on the sense that not only is there no longer a revolutionary
subject, but that it is the non-sub itself that has become
revolutionary, that is to say, effective against Empire. By instilling
in the cybernetic machine this sort of permanent, daily, endemic
conflict, Autonomia succeeded in making the machine ungovernable.
Significantly, Empireâs response to this any enemy [ennemi quelconque]
will always be to represent it as a structured, unitary organization, as
a subject and, if possible, to turn it into one. âI was speaking with a
leader of the Movement; first of all, he rejects the term âleaderâ: they
have no leaders. [ ...] The Movement, he says, is an elusive mobility, a
ferment of tendencies, of groups and sub-groups, an assemblage of
autonomous molecules. [ ...] To me, there is indeed a ruling group to
the Movement; it is an âinternalâ group, insubstantial in appearance but
in reality perfectly structured. Rome, Bologna, Turin, Naples: there is
indeed a concerted strategy. The ruling group remains invisible and
public opinion, however well informed, is in no position to judge.â
(âThe Autonomistsâ Paleo-Revolution,â Corriere della Sera, May 21, 1977)
. No one will be surprised to learn that Empire recently tried the same
thing to counter the return of the anti-capitalist offensive, this time
targeting the mysterious âBlack Blocs.â Although the Black Bloc has
never been anything but a protest technique invented by German
Autonomists in the 1980s, then improved on by American anarchists in the
early 1990s-a technique, that is, something reappropriable,
infectious-Empire has for some time spared no effort dressing it up as a
subject in order to turn it into a closed, compact, foreign entity.
âAccording to Genovese magistrates, Black Blocs make up âan armed gangâ
whose horizontal, non-hierarchical structure is composed of independent
groups with no single high command, and therefore able to save itself
âthe burden of centralized control,â but so dynamic that it is capable
of âdeveloping its own strategiesâ and making ârapid, collective
decisions on a large scaleâ while maintaining the autonomy of single
movements. This is why it has achieved âa political maturity that makes
Black Blocs a real forceââ (âBlack Blocs Are an Armed Gang,â Corriere
della Sera, August 11, 2001 ) . Desperately compensating for its
inability to achieve any kind of ethical depth, Empire constructs for
itself the fantasy of an enemy it is capable of destroying.
âIn attempting to counter subversion it is necessary to take account of
three separate elements. The first two constitute the target proper,
that is to say the Party or Front and its cells and committees on the
one hand, and the armed groups who are supporting them and being
supported by them on the other. They may be said to constitute the head
and body of a fish. The third element is the population and this
represents the water in which the fish swims. Fish vary from place to
place in accordance with the sort ofwater in which they are designed to
live, and the same can be said of subversive organizations. If a fish
has got to be destroyed it can be attacked directly by rod or net,
providing it is in the sort of position which gives these methods a
chance of success. But if rod and net cannot succeed by themselves it
may be necessary to do something to the water which willforce the fish
into a position where it can be caught. Conceivably it might be
necessary to kill the fish by polluting the water, but this is unlikely
to be a desirable course of action. â
(Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and
Peacekee ping, 1971)
Frattanto i pesci, / di quali discendiamo tutti, / assistettero curiosi
/ at dramma personate e collettivo / di questo mondo che a loro /
indubbiamente doveva sembrare cattivo / e cominciarono a pensare,
nelloro grande mare / come e pro fondo if mare. / E chiaro che if
pensiero fo paura e dlt fostidio / anche se chi pensa e muto come un
pesce / anzi e un pesce / e come pesce e difficife da bfoccare percm fo
protegge if mare / come e pro fondo if mare Lucio Dalla, Come e pro
fondo if mare, 1977-
Empireâs reconfiguration of hostilities has largely gone unnoticed. It
has gone unnoticed because it first appeared outside metropolises, in
former colonies. The prohibition on war-a simple declaration with the
League of Nations that became actual with the invention of nuclear
weapons-produced a decisive transformation of war, a transformation that
Schmitt attempted to account for with his concept of âglobal civil war.â
Since all war between states has become criminal with respect to the
world order, not only do we now see only limited conflicts, but the very
nature of the enemy has changed: the enemy has been domesticated. The
liberal state has folded into Empire to such an extent that even when
the enemy is identified as a state, a ârogue stateâ in the cavalier
terminology of imperial diplomats, the war waged against it now takes
the form of a simple police operation, a matter of in-house management,
a law and order initiative.
Imperial war has neither a beginning nor an end, it is a permanent
process of pacification. The essential aspects of its methods and
principles have been known for fifty years. They were developed in the
wars of decolonization during which the oppressive state apparatus
underwent a decisive change. From then on the enemy was no longer an
isolable entity, a foreign nation, or a determined class; it was
somewhere lying in ambush within the population, with no visible
attributes. If need be, it was the population itself, the population as
insurgent force. The configuration of hostilities specific to the
Imaginary Party thus immediately revealed itself in the guise of
guerilla warfare, of partisan war. Consequently, not only has the army
become the police, but the enemy has become a âterroristâ -the
resistance to the German occupation was a âterroristâ activity; the
Algerian insurgents opposing the French occupation, âterroristsâ; the
anti-imperial militants of the 1970s, âterroristsâ; and, today, those
all-too-determined elements of the anti-globalization movement,
âterrorists.â Trinquier, one of the chief architects as well as a
theoretician of the Battle of Algiers: âThe job of pacification
devolving on the military would create problems that it was not
accustomed to have to solve. Exercising police powers in a large city
was not something it knew well how to do. The Algerian rebels used a new
weapon for the first time: urban terrorism. It offers an incomparable
advantage, but it has one serious drawback: the population that harbors
the terrorist knows him. At any time, given the opportunity, it might
denounce him to the authorities. Strict control of the population can
rob him of this vital source of supportâ (Le Temps perdu). Historical
conflict hasnât followed the principles of classical warfare for over a
half-century; for more than a half-century now there have been only
extraordinary wars.
It is these extraordinary wars, these irregular forms of war without
principles, that have gradually dissolved the liberal state into the
Imaginary Party. All the counterinsurgency doctrines-those of Trinquier,
Kitson, Beauffre, Colonel Chateau-Jobert-are categorical on this point:
the only way to fight guerilla warfare, to fight the Imaginary Party, is
to employ its techniques. âOne must operate like a partisan wherever
there are partisans.â Again, Trinquier: âBut he must be made to realize
that, when he [the insurgent] is captured, he cannot be treated as an
ordinary criminal, nor as a prisoner taken on the battlefield. No lawyer
is present for such an interrogation. If he gives the information
requested, the examination is quickly terminated; if not, specialists
must force his secret from him. Then, as a soldier, he must face the
suffering, and perhaps the death, he has heretofore managed to avoid.
The terrorist must accept this as a condition inherent in his trade and
in his methods of warfare that, with full knowledge, his superiors and
he himself have chosenâ (Modern Warfare) The continuous surveillance of
the population, the labeling of at-risk dividuals, legalized torture,
psychological warfare, police control of Publicity, the social
manipulation of affects, the infiltration and exflltration of âextremist
groups,â the state-run massacre, like so many other aspects of the
massive deployment of imperial apparatuses, respond to the necessities
of uninterrupted war, most often carried out without a fuss. For as
Westmoreland said: âA military operation is only one of a variety of
ways to fight the communist insurgencyâ (âCounterinsurgency,â
Tricontinental, 1969) .
In the end, only partisans of urban guerrilla warfare have understood
what the wars of decolonization were all about. Modeling themselves on
the Uruguayan Tupamaros, they alone grasped the contemporary stakes in
the conflicts of ânational liberation.â They alone, and the imperial
forces. The chairman of a seminar on âThe Role of the Armed Forces in
Peace-Keeping in the 1970s,â held by the Royal United Services Institute
for Defense Studies in London in April 1973, declared, âif we lose in
Belfast we may have to fight in Brixton or Birmingham. Just as in Spain
in the thirties was a rehearsal for a wider European conflict, so
perhaps what is happening in Northern Ireland is a rehearsal of urban
guerilla war more widely in Europe and particularly in Great Britain.â
All the current pacification campaigns, all the activities of
âinternational peacekeeping forcesâ currently deployed on the outskirts
of Europe and throughout the world, obviously foreshadow other
âpacification campaigns,â this time on European territory. Only those
who fail to understand that their role is to train people struggling
against us seek in some mysterious worldwide conspiracy the reason for
these operations. No personal trajectory better sums up the expansion of
external pacification to domestic pacification than that of the British
officer Frank Kitson, the man who established the strategic doctrine
thanks to which the British state defeated the Irish insurgency and NATO
the Italian revolutionaries. Thus Kitson, before confiding his doctrine
in Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping,
took part in the decolonization wars in Kenya against the Mau-Mau, in
Malaysia against the communists, in Cyprus against Grivas, and, finally,
in Northern Ireland. From his doctrine we will focus on only a bit of
first-hand information concerning imperial rationality. We will condense
them to three postulates. The first is that there is absolute continuity
between the pettiest crimes and insurgency proper. For Empire, war is a
continuum-warfare as a whole, says Kitson; it is necessary to respond
from the very first âincivilityâ to whatever threatens the social order
and in so doing to ensure the âintegration of military, police, and
civil activities at every levelâ Civilian-military integration is the
second imperial postulate. Because during the time of nuclear
pacification wars between states became increasingly rare and because
the essential job of the army was no longer external but domestic
warfare, counterinsurgency, it was advisable to accustom the population
to a permanent military presence in public spaces. An imaginary
terrorist threat-Irish or Muslim-would justify regular patrols of armed
men in train stations, airports, subways, etc. In general, one would
look to multiply the points of indistinction between civilians and the
military. The computerization ofthe social sphere, that is, the fact
that every movement tends to produce information, is at the heart of
this integration. The proliferation of diffuse surveillance apparatuses,
of tracing and recording, serves to generate an abundance of low-grade
intelligence on which the police can then base its activities. The third
principle of imperial action following this preparatory insurrectionary
phase-which is the normal political situation- involves âpeace
movements.â As soon as violent opposition to the existing order arises,
peace movements among the population must be accommodated if not created
out of whole doth. Peace movements serve to isolate the rebels while
they are infiltrated in order to make them commit acts that discredit
them. Kitson explains the strategy; employing the poetic formula,
âdrowning the baby in its own milk.â In any event, it is never a bad
idea to brandish an imaginary terrorist threat in order to âmake the
living conditions of the population sufficiently uncomfortable that they
create a stimulus to return to normal life.â If Trinquier had the honor
of advising American counterinsurgency bigshots, the man who in 1957 had
already established a vast system of neighborhood policing, of
controlling the Algiers population, a system given the modernist name
âUrban Security Apparatus,â Kitson for his part saw his work reach the
highest circles of NATO. He himself quickly joined the Atlanticist
organization. Hadnât that always been his calling? He who hoped that his
book would âdraw attention to the steps which should be taken now to
make the army ready to deal with subversion, insurrection, and
peace-keeping operations during the second half of the 1970s,â which he
concluded by emphasizing the same point: âMeanwhile it is permissible to
hope that the contents of this book will in some way help the army to
prepare itself for any storms which may lie ahead in the second half of
the 1970s.â
Under Empire, the very persistence of the formal trappings of the state
is part of the strategic maneuvering that renders it obsolete. Insofar
as Empire is unable to recognize an enemy, an altrerity, an ethical
difference, it cannot recognize the war conditions it has created. There
will therefore be no state of exception as such but a permanent,
indefinitely extended state of emergency. The legal system will not be
officially suspended in order to wage war against the domestic enemy,
against the insurgents, or whatever else; to the current system will
simply be added a collection of ad hoc laws designed to fight the
unmentionable enemy. âCommon law will thus transform into a prolif
erative and supererogatory development of special rules: the rule will
consequently become a series of exceptionsâ (Luca Bresci, Oreste
Scalzone, Italia: fa excepcion es fa regia [ The Exception Is the
Rule]). The sovereignty of the police, which have again become a war
machine, will no longer suff opposition. THEY will recognize the
policeâs right to shoot on sight, reestablishing in practice the death
penalty which, according to the law, no longer exists. THEY will extend
the maximum time spent in police custody such that the charges will
henceforth amount to the sentence. In certain cases, the âfight against
terrorismâ will justifY imprisonment without trial as well as
warrantless searches. In general, THEY will no longer judge facts, but
persons, subjective conf ormity, oneâs aptitude for repentance; to that
end, sufficiently vague qualifiers like âmoral complicity,â âillegal
membership in a criminal organization,â or âinciting civil warâ will be
created. And when that is no longer enough, THEY will judge by theorem.
To demonstrate clearly the difference between accused citizens and
âterrorists,â THEY will invoke laws dealing with ref ormed criminals in
order to allow the accused to dissociate himself from himself, that is,
to become vile. Significantly reduced sentences will then be granted; in
the contrary case, Beru fiverbote will prevail, outlawing the exercise
of certain sensitive professions that require protection from subversive
contamination. And yet, such a set of laws, like the Real law in Italy
Of the German emergency acts, only respond to an already declared
insurrectional situation. A lot more heinous are the laws intended to
arm the preventative fight against the war machines of the Imaginary
Party. Unanimously ratified âanti-sect lawsâ will supplement
âanti-terrorism,â as happened recently in France, in Spain, and in
Belgium; laws that prosecute-without concealing the intention to
criminalize- every autonomous assembly of the false national community
of citizens. Unfortunately, it may become increasingly difficult to
avoid local excesses of zeal like the âanti- extremism lawsâ passed in
Belgium in November 1998, which penalize âall racist, xenophobic,
anarchist, nationalist, authoritarian, or totalitarian conceptions or
aims, whether political, ideological, religious, or philosophical in
nature, contrary [...] to the functioning of democratic institutions.â
In spite of all that, it would be wrong to believe that the state will
survive. In the global civil war, its supposed ethical neutrality no
longer fools anyone. The tribunal-form itself, whether civil court or
the International Criminal Tribunal, is perceived as an explicit mode of
warfare. It is the idea of the state as a mediation between parties that
is f.illing by the wayside. The historical compromise-experimented with
in Italy from the early 1970s but now a reality in all biopolitical
democracies following the disappearance of all effective opposition on
the classical political stage-has finished off the very principle of the
state.
In this way, the Italian state failed to survive the 1970s, to survive
diffuse guerilla warfare, or rather it didnât survive as a state, only
as a party, as a party of citizens, that is, as a party of passivity and
police. And this is the party that the passionate economic turnaround of
the 1980s blessed with an ephemeral victory. Bur the total shipwreck of
the state only really came when one man took power, took over the
theatre of classical politics, a man whose entire program was
specifically designed to jettison classical politics and put pure
entrepreneurial management in its place. At that point the state openly
took on the role of a party. With Berlusconi, it isnât a single
individual who has taken power but a form-of-life: that of a
narrow-minded, self-seeking, philofascist petty-entrepreneur from the
North of Italy. Power is once again ethically-based-based on business as
the only form of socialization after the family-and he who embodies it
re presents no one and certainly not a majority, but is a perfectly
discernable form-of-life with which only a small fraction of the
population can identify. Just as everyone recognizes in Berlusconi the
done of the neighborhood asshole, the perfect copy of the worst local
parvenu, everyone knows that he was a member of the P2 Lodge that turned
the Italian state into its own personal instrument. This is how, bit by
bit, the state sinks into the Imaginary Party.
âThe repressive societies now being established have two new
characteristics: repression is softer, more diffuse, more generalized,
but at the same time much more violent. For all who can submit, adapt,
and be channeled in, there will be a lessening of political
intervention. There will be more and more psychologists, even
psychoanalysts, in the police department, there will be more community
therapy available; the problems of the individual and of the couple will
be talked about everywhere; repression will be more psychologically
comprehensive. The work of prostitutes will have to be recognized, there
will be a drug advisor on the radio-in short, there will be a general
climate of understanding acce ptance. But if there are categories and
individuals who escape this inclusion, if people attempt to question the
general system of confinement, then they will be exterminated like the
Black Panthers in the US., or their personalities exterminated as it ha
ppened with the Red Army Faction in Getman.â
(Felix Guattari, âWhy Italy?â)
âYou have divided all the people of the Empireâwhen I say that, I mean
the whole world-in two classes: the more cultured, better born, and more
in fluential everywhere you have declared Roman citizens and even of the
same stock; the rest vassals and sub jects.â
(Aelius Aristides, To Rome)
If there is a heuristic virtue to Italy in terms of politics, it is that
in general historical incandescence has the virtue of increasing the
strategic legibility of an age. Still today, the lines of forces, the
parties present, the tactical stakes, and the general configuration of
hostilities are more difficult to discern in France than in Italy; and
with good reason: the counterrevolution that was forcibly imposed in
Italy twenty years ago has barely established itself in France. The
counter-insurgency process has taken its time here, and has been given
the luxury of concealing its real nature. Having made itself
indiscernible, it has also made fewer enemies than elsewhere, or more
thoroughly duped allies.
The most troubling thing about the last twenty years is without a doubt
that Empire has managed to carve out from the debris of civilization a
brand new humanity organically won over to its cause: citizens. Citizens
are those who, at the very heart of the general conflagration of the
social sphere, persist in proclaiming their abstract participation in a
society that now only exists negatively, through the terror it exercises
over everything that threatens to abandon it and, in so doing, to
survive it. The accidents and the rationality that produce the citizen
all point to the heart of the imperial enterprise: to attenuate
forms-of-life, to neutralize bodies; and the citizen advances this
enterprise by self-annulling the risk he represents to the imperial
environment. This variable fraction of unconditional agents which empire
deducts from each population forms the human reality of Spectacle and
Biopower, the point of their absolute coincidence.
There is therefore a factory of the citizen, whose long-term
implantation is Empireâs major victory; not a social, or political, or
economic but an anthropological victory. Certainly, no effort was spared
in order to bring it off. It began with the offensive restructuring of
capitalist modes of production in reaction, starting in the early 1970s,
to the resurgence of worker conflict in factories and to the remarkable
disinterest in work then manifesting itself among the younger
generations following â68. Toyotism, automation, job enrichment,
increased flexibility and personalization of work, delocalization,
decentralization, outsourcing, just-in-time methods, project-specific
management, the closure of large manufacturing plants, flextime, the
liquidation of heavy industrial systems, worker consolidation- these are
but aspects of the reforms of the modes of production whose main purpose
was to restore capitalist power over production. The restructuring was
everywhere initiated by advanced columns of employers, theorized by
enlightened union bosses, and put in place with the approval of the
principal union organizations. As Lama explained in La Repubblica in
1976: âthe left must, with purpose and a clean conscience, help to
reestablish todays much diminished profit margins, even if it means
proposing measures that prove costly to the workers.â And Berlinguer
would declare at the same time that âproductivity is not the weapon of
the employer,â but âa weapon of the workersâ movement for advancing a
politics of transformation.â The effect of restructuring was only
superficially the objective: âto part simultaneously with oppositional
workers and abusive petty tyrantsâ (Boltanski, The New Spirit of
Capitalism) . The objective was rather to purge the productive center of
a society in which production was becoming militarized, to purge it of
all the âdeviants,â of all the at-risk dividuals, of all the agents of
the Imaginary Party. It was, furthermore, through the same methods that
standardization operated inside and outside the factory: by portraying
targets as âterrorists.â There was no other reason for the firing of the
âFiat 61â in 1979, which foreshadowed the imminent defeat of workersâ
struggles in Italy. It goes without saying that such actions would have
been impossible had worker leadership not actively participated in them,
the latter being no less interested than management in eradicating
chronic insubordination, unruliness, worker autonomy, âall this constant
sabotage, absenteeism, this ungovernable, deviant, criminal activityâ
which the new generation of workers had imported to the factory.
Certainly no one was in a better position than the left to mould
citizens; it alone could criticize this or that person for deserting âat
a time when we are all called on to show our civic courage, each of us
in our own jobâ-thundered Amendola in 1977, lecturing Sciascia and
Montale.
For more than twenty years, there has therefore been an entire
calibration of subjectivities, an entire mobilization of employee
âvigilance,â a call for self-control from all sides, for subjective
investment in the production process, for the kind of creativity that
allows Empire to isolate the new hard core of its society: citizens. But
this result couldnât have been achieved had the offensive over work not
been simultaneously supported by a second, more general, more moral
offensive. Its pretext was âthe crisis.â The crisis not only consisted
in making commodities artificially scarce in order to renew their
desirability, their abundance having produced, in â68, all too obvious
disgust. Above all, the crisis renewed Bloomsâ identification with the
threatened social whole, whose fate depended on the goodwill of
everyone. That is precisely what is at work in the âpolitics of
sacrifice,â in the call to âtighten our belts:â and more generally,
currently; to behave âin a responsible wayâ in everything we do. But
responsible for what, really? for our shitty society? for the
contradictions that undermine your mode of production? for the cracks in
your totality? Tell me! Besides, this is how one is sure to recognize
the citizen: by his individual introjection of these contradictions, of
the aporias of the capitalist whole. Rather than fight against the
social relations ravaging the most basic conditions of existence, the
citizen sorts out his garbage and fills his car with alternative fuel.
Rather than contributing to the construction of another reality, on
Fridays after work he goes to serve meals to the homeless in a center
run by slimy religious conservatives. And that is what he is going to
talk about at dinner the next day.
The most simple-minded voluntarism and the most gnawing guilty
conscience: these are the citizenâs defining characteristics.
Rarely has an intellectual endeavor been more unwelcome, more vulgar,
and more pointless than the one undertaken by the aspiring managers of
socialized Capital in their first bullshit-inaugurating issue of the rag
Multitudes. Of course, I wouldnât even mention a publication whose only
reason for being is to serve as the theoretico-urbane showcase for the
most disastrous of careerists, Yann Moulier-Boutang, were the ragâs
scope not to reach beyond the militant mico-circles that stoop to
reading Multitudes.
Always hanging on the latest shenanigans of their master, who in Exile
sang the praises of the âinflationary biopolitical entrepreneur,â the
bureaucrats of Parisian Negrism attempted to introduce a positive
distinction between Biopower and biopolitics. Identifying themselves
with a nonexistent Foucauldian orthodoxy, they courageously rejected the
category of Biopower-which was really too critical, too molar, too
unifying. To this they opposed biopolitics as âthat which envelops power
and resistance as a new language which each day compels them to confront
equality and difference, the two principles-political and biological-of
our modernity.â Since, as it was, someone more intelligent, namely,
Foucault, had already pronounced the truism that âthere is power only
between free subjects,â these gentlemen considered the notion of
Biopower all too extreme. How could a productive power, whose purpose is
to maximize life, be all bad? And furthermore, how democratic is it to
speak of Biopower-or even of Spectacle? And wouldnât doing so be a first
step towards a kind of secession? âBiopolitics,â Lazzarato in his pink
tutu prefers to think, âis therefore the strategic coordination of these
power relations such that the living produce greater force.â And leave
it to the imbecile to conclude with an exhilarating program announcing a
âreturn of biopower to biopolitics, of âthe art of governingâ to the
production and government of new forms of life.â
Of course, no one could say that Negrists have ever been burdened by
philological concerns. It is always a bit frustrating to have to remind
them that the project of a guaranteed salary was, well before they
struck on the idea, proposed by the para-Nazi intellectual movement led
by Georges Duboin, a movement that during the Occupation inspired the
âscientificâ work of the group âCollaboration.â Similarly, it is with
great modesty that we remind these morons of the origin of the concept
of biopolitics. Its first occurrence in French dates to 1960. La
Biopolitique was the title of a short pamphlet by the peace-drunk
Genevese doctor A. Starobinski. âBiopolities acknowledges the existence
of the purely organic forces that govern human societies and
civilizations. These are indiscriminate forces that drive the human
masses against each other and provoke the bloody conflicts between
nations and civilizations which lead to their destruction and
extinction. But biopolitics also acknowledges the existence of
constructive and conscious forces in the life of societies and
civilizations which protect them and open new and optimistic
perspectives to humanity. The indiscriminate forces-Caesarism, brute
force, the will to power, the destruction of the weakest by force or
trickery, through pillage or plunder. [...] While accepting the reality
of these facts in the history of civilizations, we will go further still
and maintain that the reality of truth, justice, the love of the Divine
and of oneâs neighbor, mutual aid, and human brotherhood exists. All
those who share the ideal of brotherhood, all those who preserve in
their heart the ideal of Goodness and justice work to protect the
superior values of civilization. We must recognize that everything we
have, that everything we are-our security, our education, our very
possibility of existing-we owe to civilization. This is why our basic
duty is to do everything we can to protect and save it. To that end,
each of us must let go of our personal preoccupations, dedicate
ourselves to activities that improve society, develop our spiritual and
religious values, and actively participate in cultural life. I do not
believe that this Is difficult, though goodwill is especially called
for. For each one of us, the thoughts and action of each one of us, has
a role to play in universal harmony. Every optimistic vision of the
future is therefore both a duty and a necessity. We mustnât fear war and
the disasters which result, for we are already there, we are already in
a state of war.â The attentive reader will have noticed that we have
stopped ourselves from quoting the passages from the pamphlet that
advocate âeliminating from within [our society] everything that might
hasten its decline,â and the conclusion that atthe current stage of
civilization, humanity must be united.â
But the good Genevese doctor is but a sweet dreamer compared to those
who would usher biopolitics into the French intellectual universe for
good: the founders of the Cahiers de fa politique, published in whose
first issue was 1968. Its director, its kingpin, was none other than
Andre Birre, the grim functionary who went from the League of Human
Rights and a great project for social revolution in the Collaboration.
The CaMers de fa 1930s to biopolitique, the mouthpiece of the
Organisation du Service de la Vie, also wanted to save civilization.
âWhen the founding members of the âOrganisation du Service de la Vieâ
conferred in 1965, after twenty years of unflagging work to define their
position regarding the current situation, their conclusion was that if
humanity wants to continue evolving and reach a higher plane, in
accordance with the principles of Alexis Carrel and Albert Einstein, it
must purposefully restore its respect for the Laws of Life and cooperate
with nature instead of seeking to dominate and exploit it as it does
today. [...] This way of thinking, which will enable us to reestablish
order in an organic way and allow techniques to reach their full
potential and demonstrate their effectiveness, is biopolitical
Biopolitics can provide us the understanding we lack, for it is at once
the science and the art of using human knowledge according to the givens
of the laws of nature and ontology which govern our lives and our
destiny.â In the two issues of Cahiers de fa biopolitique, one thus
discovers logical digressions on the âreconstruction of the human
being,â the âsigns of health and quality,â the ânormal, abnormal, and
pathological,â among considerations entitled, âwhen women govern the
world economy,â âwhen international organizations open the way to
biopolitics,â or better yet, âour motto and charter in honor oflife and
service.â âBiopolitics,â we learn, âhas been defined as the science of
the conduct of states and human communities in light of natural laws and
environments and the ontological givens that govern life and determine
menâs actions.â
It should now be easier to understand why the Negrists of ... not long
ago called for a âminor biopoliticsâ: because a major biopolitics,
Nazism, wasnât, it seems, very satisfying. Thus the little Parisian
Negristsâ windy incoherence: if they were coherent, they may be
surprised to find themselves suddenly the bearers of the imperial
project itself, that of recreating an integrally engineered, finally
pacified and fatally productive social fabric. But, luckily for us,
these chatterers are clueless. All they are doing is reciting, to a
techno beat, the old patristic doctrine of oikonomia, a doctrine which
they know nothing about and have precisely no idea that the first
millennium Church came up with it in order to found the limitless range
of its temporal prerogatives. In patristic thought the notion of
oikonomia-which can be translated in a hundred different ways:
incarnation, plan, design, administration, providence, responsibility,
office, compromise, dishonesty, or ruse-is what allows one to deSignate
in a single concept: the relation of the divinity to the world, of the
Eternal to historical development, of the Father to the Son, of the
Church to its faithful, and of God to his icon. âThe concept of economy
is an organicist, functionalist one that simultaneously concerns the
flesh of the body, the flesh of speech, and the flesh of the image. The
notion of a divine plan with the aim of administering and managing
fallen creation, and thus of saving it, makes the economy interdependent
with the whole of creation from the beginning of time. Because of this,
the economy is as much Nature as Providence. The divine economy watches
over the harmonious conservation of the world and the preservation of
all its parts as it runs in a well-adjusted, purposive manner. The
incarnational economy is nothing other than the spreading out of the
Fatherâs image in its historic manifestation. The economic thought of
the church thus constitutes at once an administrative and corrective way
of thinking. It is administrative in that oikonomia is at one with the
organization, management, and development of each ministry. But it is
also necessary to add to its corrective function, because human
initiatives that are not inspired by grace can only engender
inequalities, injustices, or transgressions. The divine and
ecclesiastical economy must therefore take charge of the wretched
management of our history and regulate it in an enlightened and
redemptive wayâ (Marie-Jose Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy). The
doctrine of oikonomia, that of a final because suffering, original
integration of all even death, even sin-with divine incarnation is the
declared program of the biopolitical project in so far as the latter is
first of all a project for universal inclusion, for the total
subsumption of all things in the boundless oikonomia of the perfectly
immanent divine: Empire. In this way, when the magnum opus of Negrism,
Empire, proudly identifies itself with an ontology of production, it is
impossible to miss what our suit-clad theologian means: everything is
produced in so far as it is the expression of an absent subject, of the
absence of the subject, the Father, in virtue of which everything
is-even exploitation, even counterrevolution, even state massacres.
Empire logically doses with these lines: âOnce again in post-modernity
we find ourselves in [Saint] Francisâs situation, posing against the
misery of power the joy of being. This is a revolution that no power
will control-because biopower and communism, cooperation and revolution
remain together, in love, simplicity, and also innocence. This is the
irrepressible lightness of and joy of being communist.â
âBiopolitics may very well lead to a revolt of the executives,â bemoaned
Georges Henein in 1967.
âNever has society been as absorbed in the ceremonials of the âproblem,
and never has it been so democratically uniform in every sphere of
socially-guaranteed survival. As differentiations between classes
gradually fade, new generations âflowerâ on the same stalk of sadness
and stupor; which is explained away in the widely publicized eucharist
of the âproblem.â And while the most extreme leftism-in its most
coherent form- calls for pay for everyone, capital caresses ever less
modestly the dream of giving it what it wants: of purging itself of the
pollution of production and allowing men the freedom to simply produce
themselves as capitalâs empty forms, its containers, each one confronted
with the same enigma: why am I here?â
(Giorgio Cesarano, Manuale di sopravivvenza [Survival Manual]-1974)
There is no need to refute Negrism. The facts do al l the work. It is,
however, important to frustrate the ways in which it will likely be used
against us. The purpose of Negrism, in the last analysis, is to provide
the party of the citizens with the most sophisticated ideology. When the
confusion surrounding the obviously reactionary character of Bovism and
ATTAC finally lifts, Negrism will step forward as the last possible
socialism, cybernetic socialism.
Of course, it is already amazing that a movement opposed to âneo-liberal
globalizationâ in the name of a âduty to civilizationâ -which pities
âyoung peopleâ for being held in a âstate of infra-citizenshipâ only
finally to spew forth that âto answer the challenge of social
disintegration and political desperation demands redoubling civic and
activist effortsâ (Tout sur ATTAC) pass for representing any kind of
opposition to the dominant order. And if it distinguishes itself at all,
it does so only in the anachronism of its positions, the inanity of its
analyses. Furthermore, the quasi-official convergence of the citizensâ
movement with lobbies advocating greater state control can only last so
long. The massive participation of deputies, judges, functionaries,
cops, elected officials, and so many ârepresentatives of civil society,â
which gave ATTAC such resonance initially, has over time dispelled any
illusions in its regard. Already the vacuity of its first
slogans-âtaking back our worldâs future togetherâ or âdoing politics
differentlyâ -has given way to less ambiguous formulas. âA new world
order must be envisioned then built, one that embraces the difficult and
necessary submission of all-individuals, corporations, and states-to the
common interest of humanityâ (Jean de Maillard, Ie march!fait sa Loi: De
lâusage du crime par La mondiaLisation).
No need for predictions here: the most ambitious in the so-called
âanti-globalization movementâ are already open Negrists. The three
watchwords typical of political Negrism-for all its strength lies in its
ability to provide informal neo-militants with issues on which to focus
their demands-are the âcitizenâs dividend,â the right to free movement
(âPapers for everyone!â) , and the right to creativity, especially if
computer-assisted. In this sense, the Negrist perspective is in no way
different from the imperial perspective but rather a mere instance of
perfectionism within it. When Moulier-Boutang uses all the paper at his
disposal to publish a political manifesto entitled âFor a New New Deal,â
hoping to convert all the various Lefts of good faith to his project for
society, he does nothing more than reiterate the truth about Negrism.
Negrism indeed expresses an antagonism, but one within the management
class, between its progressive and conservative parts. Hence its curious
relationship to social warfare, to practical subversion, its systematic
recourse to simply making demands. From the Negrist point of view,
social warfare is but a means to pressure the opposing side of power. As
such, it is unacceptable, even if it may be useful. Hence political
Negrismâs incestuous relationship with imperial pacification: it wants
its reality but not its realism. It wants Biopolitics without police,
communication without Spectacle, peace without having to wage war to get
it.
Strictly speaking, Negrism does not coincide with imperial thought; it
is simply the idealist face of imperial thought. Its purpose is to raise
the smokescreen behind which everyday imperial life can safely proceed
until, invariably, the facts contradict it. For this reason, it is again
in its very realization that Negrism offers its best refutation. Like
when an illegal immigrant gets a green card and then is satisfied with
the most banal assimilation; like when the Tute Bianche got itself
smacked in the face by an Italian police force with which they thought
they had come to an understanding; like when Negri complains, at the end
of a recent interview, that in the 1970s the Italian state was unable to
distinguish among its enemies âthose who could be rehabilitated f rom
those who couldnâtâ. Despite its conversion to Negrism, the citizensâ
movement is thus most certainly going to disappoint him. It is likely
that a citizenâs dividend will be established, and to a certain extent
already is, in the form of welfare payments for political passivity and
ethical conformity. Citizens, insofar as they are made to compensate
more and more frequently for the failures of the welfare state, will be
paid more and more overtly for their work in comanaging social
pacification. A citizenâs dividend will therefore be established as a
form of coercion to maintain self -discipline, in the form of strange,
extremely tight-knit, community policing. If necessary; THEY might even
call it existence wages,â since it would in fact entail sponsoring those
forms-of-life most compatible with Empire. As the Negrists predict,
affects will be, indeed already are being âput to workâ: a growing
proportion of surplus value is made from forms of work that require
linguistic, relational, and physical skills that can only be acquired,
not in the sphere of production, but in the sphere of reproduction; work
time and life time are effectively becoming indistinguishable-but all
that merely foreshadows the greater submission of human existence to the
process of cybernetic valorization. The immaterial work that the
Negrists present as a victory of the proletariat, a âvictory over
factory discipline,â without question contributes to imperial aims,
constituting the most underhanded of domesticating apparatuses,
apparatuses for the immobilization of bodies. Proletarian
self-valorization, theorized by Negri as the ultimate subversion, is
also taking place but in the form of universal prostitution. Everyone
sells himself as best he can, sells as many parts of his existence as he
can, even resorts to violence and sabotage to do it, although
self-valorization really only measures the self-estrangement that the
value system has extorted from him, really only sanctions the massive
victory of the system. In the end, the Negrist-citizen ideology will
only serve to conceal in the Edenic attire of universal Participation
the military requirement âto associate as many prominent members of the
population, especially those who have been engaged in nonviolent action,
with the governmentâ (Kitson), the requirement to make them participate.
That loathsome Gaullists of the Yolan Bresson-type fight for more than
twenty years for existence income, placing on it their hope for a
âtransformation of social life,â should offer further proof of the true
strategic function of political Negrism. A f unction that Trinquier,
quoted by Kitson, wouldnât have denied: âThe Sine Qua Non of victory in
modern warfare is the unconditional support of the population.â
But the convergence of Negrism with the citizensâ project for total
control occurs elsewhere, not at the ideological but at the existential
level. The Negrist, a citizen to this extent, lives in denial of obvious
ethical facts by conjuring away civil war. But whereas the citizen works
to contain every expression of forms-of-life, to conserve ordinary
situations, to standardize his environment, the Negrist practices an
extreme and extremely spirited ethical blindness. To him, everything is
the same aside from the petty political calculations of which he
occasionally avails himself . Those who speak of Negriâs casuistry
therefore miss the essential point. His is a veritable disability, a
tremendous human deformity. Negri would like to be âradicalâ but he
canât manage it. To what depth of the real, in fact, can a theoretician
go who declares: âI consider Marxism a science whose employers and
workers serve each other in equal measure, even if it is from different,
opposite positionsâ? A professor of political philosophy who confides:
âPersonally, I hate intellectuals. I only feel comfortable with
working-class people (especially if they are manual workers: in fact, I
consider them among my dearest friends and teachers) and with
businessmen (I also have some excellent friends among factory-owners and
professionals)â? What is the sententious opinion worth of someone who
fails to grasp the ethical difference between a worker and an owner, who
regarding the businessmen of Le Sen tier is capable of writing: âThe new
company manager is an organic deviant, a mutant, an
impossible-to-eliminate anomaly. The new union official, that is, the
new type of company manager, doesnât worry about wages except in terms
of social incomeâ? Someone who confuses everything, declaring that
ânothing reveals the enormous historical positivity of worker
self-valorization better than sabotage,â and recommends, for every
revolutionary possibility, âaccumulating a diff erent capitalâ? Whatever
his claims to playing the hidden strategist behind the âpeople of
Seattle,â someone who lacks the most elementary personal knowledge of
himself and the world, the tiniest ethical sensitivity, can only produce
disaster, reduce everything he touches to a state of undifferentiated
flow, to shit. He will lose all the wars into which his desire to flee
compels him, and in those wars he will lose those closest to him and,
worse still, he will be incapable of recognizing his defeat. âAll armed
prophets have conquered, and unarmed ones fail. In the seventies, Negri
might have understood this passage as a clarion call to frontal
collisions with the state. Decades later, Empire offers by contrast an
optimism of the will that can only be sustained by a millenarian erasure
of the distinction between the armed and the unarmed, the powerful and
the abjectly powerlessâ (Gopal Balakrishnan,âVirgilian Visionsâ)
âStarting in February something apparently inexplicable had begun to
shake the de pths of Milan. A ferment, a kind of awakening. The city
seemed to be coming back to life. But it was a strange life, an all too
vigorous, too violent, and above all too marginal one. A new city
appeared to be establishing itself in the metropolis. All over Milan,
everywhere, it was the same story: bands of adolescents were launching
an attack on the city. First they occupied empty houses, vacant shops,
which the baptized âproletariat youth circles.â Then, from there, they s
pread out little by little and âtook over the neighborhood. â It went
from theatrical performances to the little âpirate markets, â not to
mention the âex propriations. âAt the height of the wave there were up
to thirty circles. Each had its headquarters, of course, and many
published small newspapers.
Milanese youth were passionate about politics and the extreme-left
groups, like the others, took advantage o f the renewed interest. More
than politics, it was about culture, a way of life, a wide-ranging
refusal of the status quo and the search for another way of life.
Milanese youth nearly in their entirety were by then aware of everything
involving the student revolts. But unlike their elders they loved Marx
and rock and roll and considered themselves freaks. [...] Fortified by
their numbers and their despair, the more-or-less politicized groups
intended to live according to their needs. The movie theaters being too
expensive, certain Saturdays they used crowbars to impose a discount on
tickets. They were out of money, so the launched a movement of
tragically simple âex propriations, âjust short of looting. A dozen of
them were enough to play the game, which involved entering a store en
masse, helping oneself, and leaving without paying. The looters were
called âThe salami gangâ because in the beginning they mainly raided
delis. Very soon jean stores and record stores were also hit. By late
1976, expro priating had become a fad, and there were few high schoolers
who hadnât tried it at least once. All classes were thrown together: the
looters were as much the sons of factory workers as of the upper middle
class and everyone united in a huge celebration that would soon turn to
tragedy.â
(Fabrizio âCoHaboâ Calvi, Camarade, P. 38)
With the exception of a tiny minority of half-wits, no one believes in
work anymore. No one believes in work anymore, but for this very reason
faith in its necessity has become all the more insistent. And for those
not put off by the total degradation of work into a pure means of
domestication, this faith most often turns into fanaticism. It is true
that one cannot be a professor, a social worker, a ticket agent, or
security guard without certain subjective after effects. That THEY now
call work what until recently was called leisure-âvideo game testersâ
are paid to play the whole day; âartistsâ to play the buffoon in public;
a growing number of incompetents whom THEY name psychoanalysts,
fortune-tellers, âcoaches,â or simply psychologists get handsomely paid
for listening to others whine-doesnât seem enough to corrode this
unalloyed faith. It even seems that the more work loses its ethical
substance, the more tyrannical the idol of work becomes. The less
self-evident the value and necessity of work, the more its slaves feel
the need to assert its eternal nature. Would there really be any reason
to add that âthe only real, true integration in the life of a man or a
woman is that experienced through school, through the world of
knowledge, and, at the end of a full and satisfYing school career,
through entering the workforceâ (Dealing with Uncivil Behavior in
School), if the obvious reality werenât already breaking through? In any
case, the Law gives up the game when it stops defining work in terms of
an activity and starts defining it in terms of availability: by work
THEY now only mean voluntary submission to the pure, exterior, âsocialâ
constraint of maintaining market domination.
Faced with these inescapable facts, even the Marxist economist loses
himself in professorial paralogisms, concluding that capitalist reason
is thoroughly unreasonable. This is because the logic of the present
situation is no longer of an economic but of an ethico-political kind.
Work is the linchpin ofthe citizen factory. As such, it is indeed
necessary, as necessary as nuclear reactors, city planning, the police,
or television. One has to work because one has to feel oneâs existence,
at least in part, as foreign to oneself And it is the same necessity
that compels THEM to take âautonomyâ to mean âmaking a living for
oneself,â that is, selling oneself, and in order to do so introjecting
the requisite quantity of imperial norms. In reality, the sole
rationality driving present-day production is the production
ofproducers, the production of bodies that cannot not work. The growth
of the cultural commodities industry, of the whole industry of the
imagination, and soon that of sensations fulfills the same imperial
function of neutralizing bodies, of depressing forms-of-life, of
bloomification. Insofar as entertainment does nothing more than sustain
self-estrangement, it represents a moment of social work. But the p
icture wouldnât be complete if we forgot to mention that work also has a
more directly militaristic function, which is to subsidize a whole
series of forms-of-life-managers, security guards, cops, professors,
hipsters, Young-Girls(see âPreliminary Materials for a Theory of the
Young Girlâ [Semiotext(e): Intervention Series #12]), etc.-all of which
are, to say the least, anti-ecstatic if not anti-insurrectional.
Of the entire putrid legacy of the workersâ movement nothing stinks as
much as the culture, and now the cult, of work. It is this culture and
this culture alone, with its intolerable ethical blindness and its
professional self-hatred, that one hears groaning with each new layoff,
with each new proof that work isfinished. What one in fact ought to do
is put together a brass band, which one could, for example, call the
âCombo For the Death of Toilâ (C.F.D.T.), and whose purpose would be to
turn up and play at each massive new layoff, marching to perfectly
ruinous, dissonant, balkanized harmonies, and trumpeting the end of work
and all the prodigious expanse of chaos opening up before us. Here as
elsewhere, not to have come to terms with the workersâ movement carries
a heavy price, and the diversionary power that a gas factory like ATTAC
represents in France has no other origin. Considering this, once one has
grasped the central position of work in the manufacturing of the
citizen, it isnât too surprising that the current heir to the workersâ
movement, the social movement, has suddenly metamorphosed into a
citizensâ movement.
We would be wrong to neglect the pure scandal, from the point of view of
the workerâs movement, created by practices through which the latter has
obviously been surpassed by the Imaginary Party. First, because the
privileged site of these practices is no longer the place of production
but rather the entire territory; second, because they arenât the means
to a further end-status, greater buying power, less work, or more
freedom-but at once sabotage and reappropriation. Here again there is no
historical context that offers us more insight into these practices,
their nature, and their limits than the Italy of the â60s and â70s. The
whole history of âcreeping Mayâ is in fact the history of the movementâs
being surpassed, the history of the extinction of âworker centrality.â
The incompatibility of the Imaginary Party with the workersâ movement
revealed itself for what it is: an ethical incompatibility. A blatant
incompatibility, for example, in the refusal to work with which southern
workers doggedly responded to factory discipline, thus shattering the
Fordist compromise. It is to the credit of a group like Potere Operaio
that it zealously brought the âwar on workâ into the factories. âThe
refusal to work and alienation from work are not occasional,â observed
the Gruppo Gramnsci in the early â70s, âbut rooted in an objective class
condition that the growth of capitalism ceaselessly reproduces and at
ever higher levels: the new strength of the working class stems from its
concentration and its homogeneity, stems from the fact that the
capitalist relation extends beyond the traditional factory (and in
particular to what is called the âservice sectorâ). In this way, it
produces resistance, goals, and behaviors there as well, all
tendentially based on the foreignness of capitalist work, and strips
workers and employees of their residual professionalism, thus destroying
their âaffectionâ for and any other kind of potential identification
with the work that capital imposes on them.â But it was only at the end
of the cycle of worker struggles in 1 973 that the Imaginary Party
actually outstripped the movement. Indeed, at that point those who
wanted to pursue the struggle had to recognize that worker centrality
had ended and take the war out of the factory. For certain of them, like
the BR, who stuck to the Leninist alternative between economic and
political struggle, leaving the factory meant immediately launching
oneself into the realm of politics, a frontal attack on state power. For
others, in particular for the âautonomes,â it meant the politicization
of everything the workersâ movement had forgotten: the sphere of
reproduction. At the time, Lotta Continua came up with the slogan, âTake
back the city!â Negri theorizes the âsocial workerâ-a sufficiently
elastic category to include feminists, the unemployed, the precarious,
artists, the marginal, rebellious youth-and the âdiffUse factory,â a
concept that justified leaving the factory because everything, in the
last analysis, from the consumption of cultural commodities to domestic
work, from then on contributed to the reproduction of capitalist society
and, therefore, the factory was everywhere. In more or less short order,
this change led to the break with socialism and with those who, like the
BR and certain autonomous workersâ groups, wanted to believe that âthe
working class in any case remains the central and governing nucleus of
communist revolutionâ (BR-Resolution ofthe Strategic Leadership, April
â75). The practices that brought about this ethical break immediately
set at odds those who believed they belonged to the same revolutionary
movement: auto-reductions in 1974, 200,000 Italian households refused to
pay their electricity bills-proletarian expropriations, squats, pirate
radio, armed protests, neighborhood struggles, diffuse guerrilla
warfare, counter-cultural celebrations, in short: Autonomia. In the
midst of so many paradoxical declarations-it should still be recalled
that Negri is the same schizophrenic who, at the end of twenty years of
militancy focused on the ârefusal to work,â ended up concluding:
âTherefore, when we spoke of the refusal to work, one should have
understood a refusal to work in the factoryâ even this dissociated
personality, because of the radicalness of the period, happened to
produce a few memorable lines like the following, taken from Domination
and Sabotage: â The self-valorization-sabotage connection, like its
opposite, prohibits us from ever having anything to do with âsocialism,â
with its tradition, whether reformism or euro-communism. It may even be
the case that we are of a different race. We are no longer moved by
anything belonging to the cardboard-cutout project of reformism, to its
tradition, to its vile illusion. We are in a materialiry that has its
own laws, already discovered or still to be discovered through
struggle-in any case, different laws. Marxâs ânew mode of exposition has
become the new mode of being of the class. We are here, implacably, in
the majority. We possess a method for destroying work. We have sought a
positive measure ofnon-work. A positive measure of freedom from this
shitty servitude which the bosses appreciate so much and which the
official socialist movement has always imposed on us like a badge of
honor. No, really; we can no longer say âsocialists,â we can no longer
accept your ignominy.â What the Movement of â77 so violently came up
against, a movement which was the scandalous, collective assumption of
forms-of-life, was the workersâ party, the party which denigrates every
form-of-life. Thousands of prisoners allow us to gauge socialismâs
hostility toward the Imaginary Party.
The whole mistake of organized Autonomia, these ârepulsive louses who
arenât sure whether ro scratch the back of the social-democrats or that
of the Movementâ (La rivoluzione 2, 1977), was to believe that the
Imaginary Party could be recognized, that an institutional mediation
would be possible. And this is the same mistake of their direct heirs,
Tute Bianche, who in Genoa believed that it was enough to behave like
cops, to denounce the âviolent elements,â for the police to leave them
alone. On the contrary, we have to start from the simple fact that our
struggle is criminal from the outset and behave accordingly. Only a
power struggle guarantees us something and above all a certain impunity.
The immediate affirmation of a need or desire-in so far as it implies a
certain knowledge of oneselfâethically contravenes imperial
pacification; and it no longer has the justification of militancy.
Militancy and its critique are both in different ways compatible with
Empire; one as a form of work, the other as a form of powerlessness. But
the practice that moves beyond all this, in which a form-of-life imposes
its way of saying âI,â is bound to fail if its impact isnât worked out
in advance. âReestablishing the paranoid scene of politics, with its
paraphernalia of aggressiveness, voluntarism, and repression, always
runs the risk of stifling and repelling reality, that which exists, the
revolt that emerges from the transformation of everyday life and from
the break with mechanisms of constraintâ (La rivoiuzione 2) .
It was Berlinguer, then head of the PCI, who shortly before the Bologna
congress in September â77 uttered these historic words: âIt is not some
plague-victims (untorelli) who will destroy Bologna.â He summarized
Empireâs opinion of us: we are untorelli, contagious agents, only good
for extermination. And in this war of annihilation we should fear the
worst from the left, because the left is the official trustee of the
faith in work, of the particular fanaticism for negating all ethical
difference in the name of an ethics of production. âWe want a society of
work and not a society of those aided by the state,â Jospin, that lump
of Calvinist-Trotskyite unhappiness, replied to the âJobless Movement.â
The credo exemplifies the dismay of a being, the Worker, whose only
sense of something beyond production lies in degradation, leisure,
consumption, or self-destruction, a being that has so utterly lost
contact with its own inclinations that it breaks down if not moved by
some external necessity, by some finality. We should recall, for the
occasion, that commercial activity, when it appeared as such in ancient
societies, couldnât be named by itself since it was not only deprived of
ethical substance but the very deprivation was raised to the level of an
autonomous activity. It could therefore only be defined negatively, as a
lack of schole for the Greeks, a-scholia, and a lack of otium for the
Latins, neg-otium. And it is still-with its celebrations, with its
protests fine a se stesso, with its armed humor, its science of drugs,
and its dissolving temporality-this old art of non work in the Movement
of â77 that makes Empire tremble the most.
What else, in the end, makes up the plane of consistency on which our
lines of flight emerge? Is there any other precondition to developing
play among forms-of-life, any other precondition to communism?