NewLinesOfAlliance_Guatarri and Negri

New Lines ofAlliance

New Spaces ofLiberty

New Lines of Alliance,New Spaces of Liberty

Flix Guattari & Antonio Negri

Minor CompositionsAutonomediaMayFlyBooks

Copyright @ 2010 Autonomedia

Main text originally published in French in 1985 as Lesnouveaux espaces de libert. First English edition, 1990, published under the title Communists Like Us.

ISBN 978-1-57027-224-0ebook ISBN: 978-1-906948-12-2

Special thanks to Mitch Verter, Arianna Bove, and MatteoMandarini.

Translated by Michael Ryan, Jared Becker, Arianna Bove,and Noe Le BlancEdited by Stevphen Shukaitis.

Released by Minor Compositions, London / New York Website: www.minorcompositions.info E-mail: [email protected]

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Published in conjunction with MayFlyBooks. Website: www.mayflybooks.org.E-mail: [email protected]

Table of Contents

Introduction: Organising CommunismMatteo Mandarini 7

1. Communists Like Us 262. The Revolution Began in 1968 33

I. Socialized ProductionII. Beyond PoliticsIII. The New Subjectivities

3. The Reaction of the 1970s: No Future 48I. Integrated World CapitalismII. North/South: Terror and HungerIII. The Right in Power

4. The Revolution Continues 63I. Recomposition of the MovementII. The Terrorist Interlude

5. The New Alliance 77I. Molecular Method of AggregationII. Machines on StruggleIII. Today, New Lines of Alliance

6. Think and Live in Another Way 92

Postscript, 1990Antonio Negri 102

Appendix One: The New Spaces of FreedomFlix Guattari 116

Appendix Two: Archeological letter. October 1984Antonio Negri 128

Organising CommunismMatteo Mandarini1

It is said that in the days of the first World War,Vladmir Illic Lenin and Tristan Tzara frequented thesame bar in Zurich, without ever encountering oneanother.

The words of the former wanted to make theworld with the strength of the will, the law and ofpower.

The later enunciated words with irony, as the cre-ation of worlds in which the will, the law and powerare suspended.

Had they understood one another, the 1900swould have been much lighter.

Had they been friends they would have construct-ed spaceships capable of navigating upon the oceanof chaos: rafts for all the refugees that depart [si allon-tanano] from the bellicose and arid lands of late-mod-ern capitalism. Franco Berardi (Felix, p. 140)

This vision of the poet and militant meeting in a smalloasis of peace surrounded by war and defeat the defeat ofanti-chauvinist social-democracy as a moment that couldhave turned creation into a political weapon and steely willinto an open process of collective singularisation, is merely

that: an hallucination of a different history.The encounter of Flix Guattari and Antonio Negri took

place in 1977. It was a meeting that occurred in the heat ofa battle that no one knew had already been lost, and theresult of their collaboration was published in a compara-tive oasis, at least for Negri who had fled Italy for Paris,once the defeat was clear for all to see.

Of course, Negri is not Lenin and Guattari is notTzara the approchement is no doubt unfair to both, for dif-ferent reasons. In the one case, it is too much to live up toand, at the same time, reduces the life of a political theoristand philosopher to his militancy; in the other, creativity andpoetry can in no way sum up a contribution that spannedthe fields of psychiatry, philosophy, semiotics and militantorganising. But perhaps this is as close as we have got tosuch an encounter for what Franco Berardi (Bifo) wascertainly pointing to was precisely the hope in the chanceencounter of revolutionary politics with desire and creation.In that sense, perhaps the names Negri and Guattaricould be said to be bearers of the categories, on the onehand, of revolutionary will and, on the other, of creation anddesire.

So this approchement serves merely to mark, with per-haps too far-fetched an image, the way that this book couldbe read today: as a call to respond to defeat by reaffirmingfaith in collective revolutionary action; with new forms oforganising, new ways of association, and new singularisa-tions of collective subjectivity combining militancy with cre-ativity.

This response to a defeat of a collective movement asksus to recommence thinking a way out from the defeat;recognising the depth of the defeat while at the same timedeclaring faith in the ideas and practices that characterisedthe movement. This book can, in many ways, be said to sumup a whole period of theoretical reflection of both theorists in Guattaris case, his Molecular Revolution, LIncoscientMachinique, and Il capitale mondiale integrato;2 and, in Negris,Marx Beyond Marx, Il comunismo e la guerra, and The

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Constitution of Time.3 To that extent, there are perhaps notheoretical advances in this book although what anextraordinary confluence of ideas and common interests anddesires are to be found here, in this book that emerges, asNegri tells us in his 1990 Postscript, from correspondencebetween the two authors while the one was in prison.

And yet, what perhaps does become explicit for the firsttime, is the question of defining and asserting fidelity to thecommunist project and, most crucially, the start of thinkinganew the question of organisation, in a way that will refuseto see these aspects divided into a means/ends dyad. Indeed,it is perhaps this refusal that most clearly marks the text,signalling a course of study and practice that though cutshort in the case of Guattari will result in Chaosmose, TheThree Ecologies and continues for Negri in his collaborationswith Michael Hardt.4 Themes that were struggling forexpression began to be first rehearsed here.

I shall focus this short introduction on the persistence ofthe question of organisation, but will begin with a fewwords on the definition of communism.

The book begins with what Negri tells us in hisPostscript was something many including friends, we canonly imagine the position of his enemies! found incompre-hensible: The project: to rescue communism from its owndisrepute. Let me begin with a restatement of the several,cumulative definitions of communism that the authors pro-vide us with in this book. Communism is:

the collective struggle for the liberation of work the assortment of social practices leading to thetransformation of consciousness and reality on everylevel: political and social, historical and everyday,conscious and unconscious the establishment of a communal life style in whichindividuality is recognized and truly liberated, notmerely opposed to the collective the singular expression for the combined

Introduction / 9

productivity of individuals and groups (collec-tivites) emphatically not reducible to each otherthe process of singularization

The gap between telos and movement is refused in theiraccount of communism. Militant organisations refuse to seethemselves as ones directed to realising an external ideal.They are instead forms that, in the process of their organi-sation-singularisation, realise communism as integral to thatmovement. But it is how organisation-communism can beinterwoven that is the daunting task to which this smallbook provides a first response.

What then are these new ways of thinking the questionof (communist)organisation that are beginning to emerge?It is, I think, important to consider the statements made bythe two authors on this question in the two newly translat-ed essays, one signed Guattari the other Negri that werepublished at the end of the original French edition of thebook in 1985.5 Guattaris account is possibly the most fullydeveloped of the two, although Negri provides an interest-ing difference of viewpoint whose importance is crucial insignalling the contrasting theoretical and practical traditionsof thinking and struggle which none the less came togetherin this remarkable little book.

In the concluding pages of his intervention, Guattari setsout three conditions to which the militant assemblages to-come. First, the

New social practices of liberation will not establishhierarchical relations between themselves; theirdevelopment will answer to a principle of transver-sality that will enable them to be established by tra-versing, as a rhizome, heterogeneous social groupsand interests (p. 123 )

That is, these militant assemblages will refuse authori-tarian discipline, formal hierarchies, orders of prioritydecreed from above, obligatory ideological reference

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points. And yet, a point to which we shall return, thismust not be seen as in conflict with what Guattari tells us isthe obviously inevitable, necessary and desirable establish-ment of centres of decision that use the most sophisticatedtechnologies of communication and aim to maximum effica-ciousness if necessary. (p. 124) This is clearly a complexand still unresolved demand to work out analytical col-lective procedures that enable the separation of the work ofdecision from the imaginary investments of power. Second, oneof the principal tasks of these new social practices will be todevelop collective and/or individual processes of singularisa-tion. Third, these mutating militant machines (p. 125) mustbe thought not as assemblages built to last and concernedwith their self-preservation but should be precarious,always in-becoming. And they should do so by promoting alogic of multivalent alliances. They must leave aside the

perverse myth of the seizing of state power by a van-guard party, without appeal or reservations. Nobodywill seize power in the name of the oppressed!Nobody will confiscate freedoms in the name of free-dom. The only acceptable objective now is the seizingof society by society itself. (p. 126).

What then of the state? Here Guattari is somewhatambiguous. The mutating militant machines are not con-cerned with taking state power, for it is not an no exteriormonster that one needs to either flee or subdue (p. 126).The state is everywhere, beginning with ourselves, at theroot of our unconscious and to that extent any militantassemblage must contend with it rather than conquering it.

Negris response is telling of some of the divergences orat least ambiguities that remained between their respectiveposition on the question of organisation and practice whichI think it is useful to highlight. On the one hand, Negri reaf-firms one of the fundamental principles of operaismo: themodernisation or neoliberal restructuring that was under-way was merely the

Introduction / 11

powerful mystification of what we were, of theknowledge that we had In order to start livingagain and organize knowledge we must break thistotality (p. 132)

That is, Negri links the process of liberation explicitlywith the necessity of destruction: A positive social practicecan be built on this act of destructive freedom today (p.132). Negri recognises that the historically and ontologicallystratified nature of the state makes any notion of its pureand simple destruction, a nonsense; and yet flirting withGuattaris terminology he states that its strata can beopened up and be given a different composition whichbreak with the capitalist policies of reterritorialisation (p.135). But all this takes place within the context of Negrisdiscussion of the dialectic of liberation and destruction. Isthis not Negris way of saying that the path of liberationmust pass through the destruction of the state howeverthis destruction might be conceived? How else to under-stand Negris claim that the the concept of the Left is a con-cept for war (p. 132) and any attempt to evade this is torender the left insignificant.

We now come to a central aspect of the question of theorganisation for liberation, of the form of militant socialpractice of liberation. This entire discussion revolvesaround the name, Lenin.

It is clear more or less explicitly that when Guattariwarns against authoritarian disciplines, formal hierarchies,orders of priorities decreed from above, and compulsoryideological references (p. 124) he is warning againstwhat we might call the Leninist temptation. At the sametime, Guattari recognises, as we have seen, the need forcentres of decision within any militant strategy. Largely,this is the question that can be said to define Leninsthought. It is, arguably, the central contribution made byLenin to the thought of how militant practice should beorganised. The question is clearly, how to think centres of

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decision outside the form given it in What is to be Done?Guattari states merely that such centres of decision willrequire the utilisation of the most sophisticated technolo-gies of communication for maximal effectiveness. It is notat all clear how this helps us. Guattari and Negri are clearabout one thing: they are against spontaneist myths, asthey write together in New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces ofLiberty; and even in his contribution to Pratique deLInstitutionnel et Politique, he defends Anti-Oedipus againstattempts to read it as an ode to spontaneity or an eulogy tosome unruly liberation.6 Thus, the debate is put very muchin the same terms as the conflict between Lenins andLuxemburgs problematics of organisation. While all this istrue, the means of resolving this question by Guattari andNegri cannot be simply reduced to one side or the other ofthe debates within the Second International. For Guattari,the refusal of spontaneism was made in order to underlinethe artificial, constructivist nature of desire that we[Guattari and Deleuze] defined as machinic To say ofdesire that it makes up part of the infrastructure amounts tosaying that subjectivity produces reality (p. 128, 129). Butwhile for Guattari this amounts implicitly to a dismissalof Lenin, Negri is much more unwilling to allow such arapid move beyond Lenin.

In Negris response to Guattari, he writes:

the history of the party, i.e. the history of the con-tinuous dialectic of class consciousness between insti-tutional structure and revolutionary agency thehistory of the party, from anarchism to social democ-racy, from socialism to Leninism, finds itselfexplained by the linear evolution of class composi-tion. Let it be clear that a process of accumulation isactually revealed through this evolution, a subjectivemovement of categorization, selection, and constitu-tion. What was retained from past consciousness andexperiences of organisation served as a critical

Introduction / 13

material means to formulate an ever renewed projectof liberation. (p. 136)

And if his position on Leninism still remains somewhatambiguous, he states that:

From this new perspective on struggle and organiz-ing, Leninism is no doubt an element to be subsumed,even if it will always be kept alive in the agency thatwe are preparing (p. 137)

And what is this always living moment of Leninism, thisstark reminder of the unforgettable function of class war(which cannot be erased or neglected), as an indication ofthe necessity to destroy the totality of the dispositif of com-mand of the enemy a never-ending task for those in searchof liberation (p. 138). Desire as construction, as machinic,is understood by Negri as the passage from movement toparty (p. 140); it depends upon the material force of themasses establishing a relationship between knowledge andthe capacity for destruction. The problem, as Negri statesit in the final words of his response, is that of how to be thecatastrophe by building it (p. 141) with Spinozas affirma-tion of a love that lies between knowledge and power andabove all, with the eternal and Goethean Lenin: in thebeginning is action. Let us make haste (p. 142).

We should, of course, mention Negris brief comments onthis debate in his 1990 Postscript to the English edition of thebook reprinted here.7 Here, the terms of the debate spontane-ity and direction are linked to the names Luxemburg andLenin but while restating the central importance of this debate,this time, instead of, as in Franois Dosses words, expressinghis ineradicable attachment to Leninism (Gilles Deleuze et FlixGuattari. Biographie Croise, F. Dosse, ditions La Dcouverte, p.357), which Dosse sees as characterising Negris concludingstatements in the Lettre Archologique, Negri states somewhatmore ambiguously, that the future movements will have toreconsider these issues.

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But we cannot conclude here. More needs to be saidabout Negris Lenin. If we are to grasp Negris continuingreliance upon Lenin for the ever renewed project of libera-tion (p. 136), and if we are to situate his Lenin withintodays Lenin revival associated with the names of Slavojiek, Alain Badiou (via the figure of Saint Paul), SylvainLazarus, and others, a brief comparison with some of thesenew approaches will be instructive.8 What would have andwill seem to many to be, at best, a misplaced nostalgia, atworst, a confirmation of the totalitarian lurking within everycommunist that reference to the name Lenin evokes, canbest be answered through a consideration of his thoughtthat refuses the simple reduction of the meaning of Lenin tostate socialism.

For this purpose it is instructive to very briefly indicatewhere Negris Lenin distinguishes himself from that of twoof the most exciting thinkers of the moment namely iekand Badious appropriation of Lenin. Let us begin withBadiou. What distinguishes his from Negris Lenin is notthat he accepts what Negri calls the position of westernpolitical science on Lenin: i.e. To speak of Lenin is tospeak of the conquest of power.9 It is true that Badiou isquite clear that the question of politics is always a questionof power for Lenin, and to think of it in any other terms isutterly nave.10 However, as Negri points, it is not the ques-tion of the seizure of power itself that is repellent,11 it is thedivorcing of the question of seizing power from the aboli-tion of the state. It is clear, however, that for all the shifts inhis thinking on the relation the subject should take to thestate, from as Alberto Toscano puts it from the dialec-tics of destruction of his Maoist phase, to the notions ofdistance and subtraction of his later thought,12 it hasnever, for Badiou, been a case of the simple capture of statepower that characterises the repellent Lenin of western(bourgeois) political science.

In fact, it is iek who perhaps best indicates whereBadious later thinking on politics and the state falls down,and that incidentally takes the same name as one of Negris

Introduction / 15

great bugbears as assiduous Negri readers will recognise namely, in the autonomy of the Political that it reveals.iek writes in Repeating Lenin: Lenins Choice:

No wonder that the Lenin Badiou and Lazarus pre-fer is the Lenin of What Is to Be Done?, the Lenin who(in his thesis that the socialist-revolutionary con-sciousness has to be brought from without to theworking class) breaks with Marxs allegedeconomism and asserts the autonomy of thePolitical, NOT the Lenin of The State and Revolution,fascinated by the modern centralized industry, imag-ining the (depoliticized) ways to reorganize economyand the state apparatus. (Revolution at the gates: a selec-tion of writings from February to October 1917, VladimirIllich Lenin and Slavoj iek, Verso, p. 271)

This quote is interesting because it manages to sum upnot only the differences between Badiou (and Lazarus) andiek and Negri, but also between the first two (or three)and Negri. As for iek, so for Negri The State and Revolutionis a more contemporary and relevant text than What is to beDone? And this is, at least in part, because the hypostatisa-tion of the political that many have drawn from it results inunderstanding (misunderstanding I would argue) the cri-tique of economism as a dismissal of political economy. Itwould, however, be a mistake to accuse Badiou of such amisunderstanding. His own reasons for inserting a radicalhiatus between the state and the economic is due to a seriesof extremely complex ontological set-theoretical reasons.13Caricaturising this complex discussion to limits set by thisshort introduction, whereas the state, society, economics,etc. are the work ordering of being, politics is the realmof the event that is irreducible to being. In this way, Leninis championed by Badiou as the subject of the event ofOctober 1917, an event without socio-economic conditions,or at least, where those conditions are not the conditions of

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the event named Bolshevik Revolution.14On this score, both iek and Negri are in agreement:

one cannot divorce economic from political indeed, Marxscritique of political economy operates a precise insertion ofthe political into the economic. However, ieks conclusionthat from The State and Revolution one should draw togetherthe strands of the Lenin-political-strategist and Lenin-tech-nocrat of the new society and new state, is equally repellentto Negri. iek frequently states that he stands in contrastto Badious championing of the moment, the event of 1917and war communism, affirming instead the project of thepatient, laborious construction of socialism (in one country,one might add). But this stress on the technocratic elementof ieks Lenin, should not be (con-)fused with the Tronti-Cacciari reading of Lenin that so often is the object ofNegris ire.15 For despite ieks rhetorical strategy ofprovocation such as his apparent championing of theLenin of Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of thewhole country,16 of the constructivist image of the cold, disci-plined, mechanised new man, etc. it is the utopian momentthat is opened and the battles for socio-cultural-organisa-tional change that excites him about Lenin, and his demandto repeat, not return to Lenin. To that extent at least, iekand Negri are not so far from one another.

And yet, a distance remains, and what links ieksLenin to Badious is what most opposes him to Negri.Despite ieks recognition of the necessary intersection ofthe political and the socio-economic that contra Badiouthe two cannot be divorced from one another by the anti-ontology of the (revolutionary) event, that true heroismresides not in blindly clinging to the early revolutionaryenthusiasm [as Badiou does], but in recognizing the rose inthe cross of the present of the material conditions one iscaught within17 nevertheless, iek reveals his very ownautonomization of the Political:

With Lenin, as with Lacan, the revolution ne sautoriseque delle meme: one should assume responsibility for

Introduction / 17

the revolutionary act not covered by the big Other the fear of taking power prematurely, the search forthe guarantee, is the fear of the abyss of the act.18

So, while iek is arguing quite correctly that Leninrefuses the revisionist tendency to await for the objectiveconditions to develop to a sufficient degree, that the stagesof social development unfold, that it is only with the say-soof these conditions, stages, laws that the process of revolu-tion is justified; nevertheless, his challenge to opportunism(to use of good Leninist epithet) that revolution cannot restupon the big Other, does not amount as iek suggests to the statement that the revolution must rest on nothingother than itself, the abyss of the act, to legitimate itself. Isthis not effectively to substitute an ethics of the revolution-ary event for a politics? By this move iek takes one stepforward and two steps back.

Let us return in conclusion to Negri then, and his veryown assertion that one should not return to but one shouldrepeat Lenin. To repeat Lenin, then, is yes to affirm whatmight be termed the subjective moment of political struggleand analysis. But such a moment cannot be condensed inthe notion of the act, the moment of decision. As always, forNegri it is a question of class composition.19 Negri writes:

it is only within this subject that the real relationsof forces can be assessed. The entire history of capi-tal is, from this standpoint, the history of class strug-gles and struggles of the different political class com-positions, and it is possible to read in the fabric ofstruggle the history of capital as its effect.20

No materialist conception of the subject can be givenother than through the filter of class composition: it isonly class composition that gives us the material andpolitical complexity of the figure of the subject.21

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The notion of class composition draws together twoaspects: a technical aspect, which involves an analysis of theworld of production, its transformation, and the effectsupon the labouring subject including the development of acertain level of needs and desires. The second aspect, thepolitical composition, concerns the ways that this first atleast partly technologically driven aspect can be appropri-ated politically. We can simplifying again speak of theway the specifics of the objective dynamics of exploitationare appropriated subjectively, i.e. from the standpoint of theworking class. Lenins great contribution was, for Negri, totranslate the real class composition, as determined specifi-cally, in organisational terms.22 But such a contributionrests on more than a political sensibility or art of interven-ing, as iek would have it.23 It means truly followingthrough on, and precisely articulating what it means torecognise that the economy is in itself political.24 Thus,whereas for Negri as well as for iek, The State andRevolution is a core text, equally Negri places much greateremphasis on Lenins analysis of capitalist development andof imperialism in its relation to the composition of theclass.25 For it is precisely in the notion of class compositionthat economic and political questions can be seen to be mostclearly intertwined.

So Negri affirms the following theses that he drawsfrom Marx and Lenin:

a)the history of capitalism is the history of classstruggle and of the figures of class composition;b)economics and politics cannot be divorced andclass composition is the plane on which they cometogether most directly; c)the subject can only be understood, in properlymaterialist fashion, via the notion of class composi-tion;d)Lenin (building on Marx in a lively, original andyet absolutely faithful way26) effected a recognition

Introduction / 19

of the real and [] proposed a full circulationbetween (subversive) political strategy and []organisation of the masses.27

A little more should be said about this last, crucialmoment d). It affirms that the party is the tool for the pro-duction of the antagonistic class subject, necessary for thismovement because of the non-reducibility of political totechnical class composition. It is precisely the non-linearline of determination from technical to political class compo-sition that Negri draws from Lenin28 and which allows fora properly revolutionary politics: class composition is freedthrough the destruction of the class antagonist, and therebybecomes a moment of creation. So not simply the dialecticalpassage from class composition via its determinate negationvertically raised to the form of revolutionary organisation but onwards further, the form of revolutionary organisation,through the insurrectionary moment establishing the dicta-torship of the proletariat that sets in train a continuous rev-olutionary movement towards communism. As Negri wroteover 35 years ago, that which:

the organisation mediates can be made immediate inthe behaviour of the working class from the momentthat overturning of the class adversarys power, fromthe moment that the working class and the proletari-at as such fully assume the task and weight of theconstruction of a new revolutionary society.29

If this is a correct summary of Negris Lenin, then it canbe argued that Negri remains true to the Lenin momentthroughout his career. For Negris texts rest upon a partic-ular analysis of class composition, of the antagonistic subjectfrom which he then operates a translation, or more proper-ly a creation of a political form adequate to the demands ofthe class subject through which the communist impulse isgiven concrete form. This is most evident in his writingsfrom the 1960s and 70s. But it is equally true of his more

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recent forays into political economy into what he callsimmaterial labour, cognitive capitalism and biopolitical pro-duction, which that mark a particular level of developmentof the subject that forms an already articulated biopoliticalreality, the subversive body of this general intellect.30

It is not possible to properly evaluate this work in thespace remaining but, to conclude, I want to highlight one ofthe risks of the new analysis a risk that contains, I believemany of the ambiguities of Negris later relations to Lenintoday. It is the risk of a refounded spontaneism. The ques-tion Negri poses is whether, today, socially cooperativeimmaterial labour can, thanks to its composite nature ascommunism prefigured, if it can be the demiurge of its ownbody, or whether it requires an external vanguard to trans-form this flesh into a body, the body of the general intel-lect.31 Negris sympathy for the former option is not indoubt, although he admits that it is a question that can onlybe decided through a genuine movement of struggle32through which it must confirm its superior strength. It isthis sympathy that made writing with Guattari all thoseyears ago a possibility. But, if this miraculating of an organ-isational form is allowed, we may ask once again whetherorganisation would be anything other than what Negri hadcondemned as the strategy of revisionist process-organisa-tion in his 1970s book on Lenin? Of course, Negri wouldpoint to the transformations in the class composition theemergence of immaterial labour, of the multitude to signalthe radical difference between conditions today and then(whether referring to early 1900s or to the 1970s); butdoubts surely remain that changes in class composition haveovercome the need for the instance of emersion from theocean of productive multiplicities; that the exigency for avertical but not transcendent political moment that slicesthrough the cooperative productivity of the multitude,reconfiguring it in a form able to strike at capital and thepractices of governance has been lain to rest. Negris 33Lezzioni includes a beautiful little cautionary passage on thisproblem, that it is necessary to restate: either organisation

Introduction / 21

is spontaneity that reflects upon itself. Otherwise it is impo-tence and defeat that try to justify themselves.33

New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty is a formidablelittle prcis of the political and theoretical contradictionsand tensions that traverse communist politics. It is these ten-sions and the relentless struggle for their resolution thatcontinue to make of communist thought the untranscend-able horizon for any revolutionary politics of our times.

Notes1. Many thanks to Stefano Harney and Alberto Toscano for

typically perceptive comments to the various drafts of thisintroduction.

2. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, translated by R.Sheed, Penguin, London 1984; Lincoscient Machinique: Essaisde Schizo-analyse, Recherches, 1979; Il capitale mondiale integra-to, Cappelli, 1982.

3. Published as the first part in Time for Revolution, A. Negri,translated by M. Mandarini, Continuum, London 2003.

4. Chasmose, F. Guattari, Galil, Paris 1982, translated inEnglish as Chaosmosis, translated by P. Bains and J. Pefanis,Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1995; Les Trois colo-gie, F. Guattari, Galil, Paris 1989, translated in English asThe Three Ecologies, translated by I. Pindar and P. Sutton,Athlone Press, London 2000. For Negris co-authored proj-ects, I have in mind particularly Empire, Harvard UniversityPress, Cambridge 2000 and Multitude, Penguin, New York2004.

5. The essays, in fact presentations that were composed in viewof a conference in Montreal shortly before the book was pub-lished, were published in neither the 1989 Italian edition northe 1990 English edition. They were originally published asaddenda to the actual text, entitled Les Nouveaux Espaces deLibert. They are translated here for the first time in Englishso that we can finally present the complete first edition of thebook.

6. Pratique de LInstitutionnel et Politique, F. Guattari, J. Oury,F.Tosquelles, Editiones Matrices, 1985, p 62, translated inThe Guattari Reader, ed. G. Genosko, Blackwell, 1996, p. 128.

7. It should be recalled that both the English and the Italian edi-tion of the text, both published at around the same time, nei-

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ther of these concluding essays were included. 8. For an outstanding collection of the variety of new approach-

es to Lenin, see Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, S.Budgen, S. Kouvelakis, S. iek editors, Duke UniversityPress, Durham and London, 2007.

9. What to do Today with What is to be Done?, or Rather: TheBody of the General Intellect, A. Negri, translated by G.Thomson, in Lenin Reloaded, p. 297. The same piece has beenpublished in a different translation in Reflections on Empire, A.Negri, translated by E. Emery, Polity, Cambridge 2008.Although Emerys translation of this expression as bourgeoispolitical science (Reflections, p. 148) is incorrect, it could beargued that this is effectively Negris accusation.

10. One Divides Itself into Two, A. Badiou, in Lenin Reloaded, p.12.

11. Reflections, p.12. From the State to the World?: Badiou and Anti-capitalism,

A. Toscano, Communication and Cognition, 37, 3-4, 2004, p.199.

13. For anyone who wants to acquaint themselves with Badiousargument, they should turn to Being and Event, A. Badiou,translated by O. Feltham, Continuum, London 2005, in par-ticular to Meditation 8 and 9. See also Metapolitics, A. Badiou,translated by J. Barker, Verso, London 2005, chapter 5Politics Unbound in particular.

14. Or more precisely still, the event cannot be extracted fromthose conditions.

15. For some discussion of the debate between Negri andCacciari and Tronti, see my Beyond Nihilism: NotesTowards a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in ItalianCommunist Thought, in Cosmos & History, 5:1, 2009.

16. Collected Works volume 31, V. I. Lenin, Lawrence & Wishart,London 1966, p. 516.

17. Trotskys Terrorism and Communism, or, Despair and Utopiain the Turbulent Year of 1920, S. iek, forward to Terrorismand Communism, by l. Trotsky, Verso, London 2007, p. xxi.

18. Trotskys Terrorism and Communism, or, Despair and Utopiain the Turbulent Year of 1920, p. xviii.

19. For a detailed discussion of the notion of class composition,see Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in ItalianAutonomist Marxism, S. Wright, Pluto Press, London 2002,and my Antagonism vs. Contradiction: Conflict and theDynamics of Organisation in the Thought of Antonio Negri

Introduction / 23

in Contemporary Organization Theory, ed. C. Jones and R.Munro, Blackwell, Oxford 2005, and in The SociologicalReview, Oct. 2005, vol. 53, s.1.

20. Trentatre Lezioni su Lenin [1977], A. Negri, Manifestolibri,Roma 2004, p. 23 my translation.

21. DallOperaio Massa allOperaio Sociale, A. Negri, edited by P.Pozzi and R. Tommasini, Multhipla Edizioni, Milan 1979, p.60 my translation.

22. 33 Lezioni, p. 23.23. A Leninist Gesture Today, S. iek, in Lenin Reloaded, p. 83.24. A Leninist Gesture Today, S. iek, in Lenin Reloaded, p. 91.25. These aspects are central to Negris analysis in his book

length study of Lenin, 33 Lezioni su Lenin, initially presentedfirst as lectures over 35 years ago, and return in Negris dis-cussion of Lenin more recently, such as in his 2001 piece,What to do Today with What is to be Done? in LeninReloaded.

26. 33 Lezioni, A. Negri, p. 164 my translation.27. What to do Today with What is to be Done?, A. Negri, p.

301.28. To await the economic conditions, to assume that specific

economic conditions will immediately determine a politicalform, this is what Lenin condemned as economism, spon-taneism and opportunism submission to the big Other, inieks (via Lacan) take on this eminently political problem.

29. 33 Lezioni, A. Negri, p. 165.30. What to do Today with What is to be Done?, A. Negri, in

Lenin Reloaded, p. 301. Negri has explored the new composi-tion of labour in seminars in Paris with Carlo Vercellone, aswell as in Reflections on Empire, his work with Michael Hardt,and elsewhere. This work is also being pursued by ChristianMarazzi, Andrea Fumagalli, Paolo Virno, MaurizioLazzarato, and many others. The journal HistoricalMaterialism has a very useful stream of articles on thesethemes.

31. What to do Today with What is to be Done?, A. Negri, inLenin Reloaded, p. 302.

32. What to do Today with What is to be Done?, A. Negri, inLenin Reloaded, p. 302.

33. 33 Lezioni, A. Negri, p. 42.

24 / Mandarini

1. Communists Like Us

The project: to rescue communism from its own disre-pute. Once invoked as the liberation of work throughmankinds collective creation, communism has instead sti-fled humanity. We who see in communism the liberation ofboth collective and individual possibilities must reverse thatregimentation of thought and desire which terminates theindividual.

Bankrupt: the collectivist regimes have failed to realizesocialist or communist ideals. Capitalism too has played fastand loose with promises of liberty, equality, progress andenlightenment. Forget capitalism and socialism: instead wehave in place one vast machine, extending over the planet anenslavement of all mankind. Every aspect of human life work, childhood, love, life, thought, fantasy, art isdeprived of dignity in this workhouse. Everyone feels onlythe threat of social demise: unemployment, poverty, welfare.

Work itself defaults on its promise of developing therelations between humanity and the material environment;now everyone works furiously, to evade eviction, yet onlyhastening their own expulsion from the mechanical processthat work has become.

Indeed work itself as organized by capitalism or social-ism has become the intersection of irrational social repro-duction and amplified social constraints. Fetters irrationalsocial constraints are thus at the foundation of all subjec-tive consciousness formed in the work process. And estab-lishing this collective subjectivity of restriction and surveil-

262626

lance is the first imperative of the capitalist work apparatus.Self-surveillance and doubt prevent any intimations ofescape, and preempt any questioning of the political, legal ormoral legitimacy of the system. No one can withdraw fromthis capitalist legality of blindness and absurd goals.

Each instance of work, each sequence, is overdeter-mined by the imperatives of capitalist reproduction; everyaction helps to solidify the hierarchies of value and authority.

And yet why is it that the discussion of communism istaboo? This discourse is defamed and banished by the verypeople it pretends to liberate from their chains. Could it bedue to the seductive, progressivist rationality of capitalismand its organization of work?

After all, capitalist work arrangements have succeededin appropriating the discourse of communism an analysisof labor and its liberatory power and reduced it to tech-niques of manipulation: Arbeit Macht Frei. Even thesocialist varieties trumpet recovery and reconstruction asthough these were instrumental goals attainable throughtechnical means. The ethic of social revolution has becomeinstead a nightmare of liberation betrayed, and the vision ofthe future is freighted with a terrible inertia

Not so long ago, the critique of capitalism was directedat its destructive, penetrating market. Today we submit toits traumatization of our souls, passively assuming that rein-vestment strategies are the least oppressive form of planning and socialism or capitalism becomes a moot point.

So now everything must be reinvented: the purpose ofwork as well as the modalities of social life, rights as well asfreedoms. We will once again begin to define communism asthe collective struggle for the liberation of work, that is, atonce, an end to the current situation!

Empty-headed economists dominate all over the globe and yet the planet is devastated, perhaps inexorably. Wemust affirm first of all that there is more than one path: thepath of capitalist imperium and/or socialist/collectivist workforms whose persistence and vitality depend to a large part

Communists Like Us / 27

on our own incapacity to redefine work as a project and aprocess of liberation. We will define communism as theassortment of social practices leading to the transformationof consciousness and reality on every level: political andsocial, historical and everyday, conscious and unconscious.Recognizing that discourse is action, we will forge a newdiscourse in such a fashion as to initiate the destruction ofthe old way. But our communism will not for all that be aspectre haunting the old Europe We rather envisage animaginative, creative process at once singular and collective,sweeping the world with a great wave of refusal and ofhope. Communism is nothing other than a call to life: tobreak the encirclement of the capitalist and socialist organi-zation of work, which today leads not only to a continuingsurplus of repression and exploitation, but to the extinctionof the world and humanity with it.

Exploitation has advanced, on the basis of nuclear accu-mulation, to become a threat of execution; the cycles of warand the danger of destruction are well known. Now we arenot determinists but today it is not only determinists whorecognize that the end is, if not near, certainly close by, espe-cially if we abandon power to the capitalist and socialist jug-gernauts of labor. Preventing catastrophe will require a col-lective mobilization for freedom. Why does everyday lifetremble with fear and loathing? This fear is not the state ofnature as described by Hobbes that old excuse of the warof all against all, individual wills fragmented in a thirst forpower. Rather what we have now is a transcendental, yetactually man made fear which seeps into every mind withimmobilizing, catastrophic dread. Indeed hope itself has fledthis hopeless, hapless, grey world. Beyond malaise, life sinksinto sadness, boredom and monotony, with no chance tobreak out of the morass of absurdity. Communication speech, conversation, banter, even conspiracy has all beentaken in by the discourse of mass media. Interpersonal rela-tions likewise have spoiled, and are now characterized byindifference, disingenuous disgust and self-hatred in aword, were all suffering from bad faith.

28 / Guattari & Negri

Amazingly, the fabric of human feelings has itself comeunraveled, since it no longer succeeds in connecting thethreads of desire and hope. As a result, this pseudo-war haspassed over the world for thirty years without its key fea-tures being noticed; the Cold War escapes unrecognized asthe true culprit.

During that whole time, human consciousness has beenground down into something more manageable, even com-plicit. As the individual sinks into isolated despair, all thebuilt up values in the world collapse around him. Fearbreeds impotence and paralysis of every sort. Only this col-lective stupefaction prevents onrushing despair from reach-ing its logical conclusion in collective suicide; apparentlytheres not enough passion left for such a crisp transforma-tion. But the real tragedy is that exploitation masqueradesas fear: individual extensions of desires and hopes for thefuture have been simply prohibited, but under a meta-physical, rather than political guise.

And yet. And yet all the developments in the sciencesand in the productive capacities of labor point to the exis-tence of an alternative. Extermination or communism is thechoice but this communism must be more than just thesharing of wealth (who wants all this shit?) it must inau-gurate a whole new way of working together.

Real communism consists in creating the conditions forhuman renewal: activities in which people can developthemselves as they produce, organizations in which the indi-vidual is valuable rather than functional. Accomplishing thisrequires a movement to change the character of workitself. And redefining work as creative activity can only hap-pen as individuals emerge from stifled, emotionally blockedrhythms of constraint. It will take more than the will tochange, in the current situation; to resist neutralization itselfdemands desire.

Paradoxical as it seems, work can be liberated because itis essentially the one human mode of existence which issimultaneously collective, rational and interdependent. Itgenerates solidarity. Capitalism and socialism have only


succeeded in subjugating work to a social mechanism whichis logocentric or paranoid, authoritarian and potentiallydestructive. By means of progressive struggles, workers inthe advanced industrial countries have succeeded in lower-ing the threshold of direct and dangerous exploitation; butthis has been countered by changes in the character of thatdomination. Modern exploitation accentuates the disparitybetween rich and poor countries now it is unfree workersin underdeveloped nations who bear the brunt of exploita-tion through violence and the threat of hunger. The relativeimprovement in the situation of the metropolitan proletariatis balanced by extermination in the Third and FourthWorlds. As contradictions built into work have proceededto their limit, it is not an accident that the liberation of workcan now be accomplished by workers in the most advancedsectors of science and technology. What is at stake is thefundamental ability of communities, racial and socialgroups, indeed minorities of every kind to conquer andestablish autonomous modes of expression not justlifestyles, but the work process itself.

There is nothing inevitable about work no destinyleads work into ever greater repressions. In fact, the poten-tial for liberation inherent in work itself is more visible thanever. How can capital continue to present its work processas natural and unchangeable, when for technical reasons itis changing every day? This unexamined gap in the logic ofwork is the opening through which new movements ofsocial transformation will charge pell mell.

Traditionally, the refusal to work, as an instance of strug-gle and as spontaneous action, has aimed at those structureswhich are obstacles to the real liberation of work. From nowon, that struggle involves appropriating a new capital, thatof a collective intelligence gained in freedom, the experienceand knowledge that comes from breaking down the onedimensional experience of present day capitalism. Thisinvolves all projects of awakening and building towards lib-eration; in short, anything that helps reclaim mastery overwork time, the essential component of life time. All the cur-


rent catchwords of capitalist production invoke this samestrategy: the revolutionary diffusion of information tech-nologies among a new collective subjectivity. This is the newterrain of struggle, and it is not utopian to believe that con-sciousness itself is the swing voter deciding if capitalist ornon-capitalist roads are taken. Once, knowledge and powerwere stockpiled like so many canon or missiles; now theempowering of a collective consciousness, part of the tur-moil of the workplace, threatens to unite small arms into amass revolt.

From this perspective, communism is the establishmentof a communal life style in which individuality is recognizedand truly liberated, not merely opposed to the collective.Thats the most important lesson: that the construction ofhealthy communities begins and ends with unique personal-ities, that the collective potential is realized only when thesingular is free. This insight is fundamental to the liberationof work. Work as exploitation has completed its develop-ment of the general, the mass, the production line; whatsnow possible is to tap into the potential of individual cre-ative energies, previously suppressed. Nothing less than agenetic breakthrough, this rhizome of autonomy in theworkplace can establish itself as a productive enhancement and a serious challenge to the dead weight of bureaucrat-ic capitalism with its overcoded and de-individualized indi-vidual.

Make no mistake about it: communism is not a blind,reductionist collectivism dependent on repression. It is thesingular expression for the combined productivity of indi-viduals and groups (collectivities) emphatically notreducible to each other. If it is not a continuous reaffirma-tion of singularity, then it is nothing and so it is not para-doxical to define communism as the process of singulariza-tion. Communism cannot be reduced in any way whatsoev-er to an ideological belief system, a simple legal contract, oreven to an abstract egalitarianism. It is part of a continuousprocess which runs throughout history, entailing a question-ing of the collective goals of work itself.


Glimpses of these new alliances are already available.They began to form and seek each other out at the time ofthe spontaneist and creative phase, which of course devel-oped parallel to the big break-up and realignment in capital-ist society to which we have been witness over the past threedecades. To better locate and appreciate their importance,one can distinguish:

* molar antagonisms: struggles in the workplace overexploitation, criticisms of the organization of work, of itsform, from the perspective of liberation;

* molecular proliferations of these isolated instances ofstruggle into the outside world, in which singular strugglesirreversibly transform the relations between individuals andcollectivities on the one hand, material nature and linguisticsigns (meanings) on the other.

Thus the maturing social transformations, which in turnaffect productive work arrangements, are induced, piece-meal, by each and every molar antagonism: any struggleagainst capitalist and/or socialist power formations con-tributes to overall transformation. Social, political andworkplace advances condition each other. But, and this isour point, the revolutionary transformation occurs in thecreation of a new subjective consciousness born of the col-lective work experience this moment is primary, all stakesare won or lost here, in the collective creation of subjectivi-ty by individuals. We need to save the glorious dream ofcommunism from Jacobin mystifications and Stalinistnightmares alike; lets give it back this power of articulation:an alliance, between the liberation of work and the libera-tion of subjectivity.

Singularity, autonomy, and freedom are the three ban-ners which unite in solidarity every struggle against the cap-italist and/ or socialist orders. From now on, this allianceinvents new forms of freedom, in the emancipation of workand in the work of emancipation.


2. THE REVOLUTION BEGAN IN 1968

I. SOCIALIZED PRODUCTIONIt is not necessary to sit reading in a caf to realize that

the cycle of revolution reopened in 1968, and indeedachieved its high water mark of intensity. What was only anindication in 1917, and which subsequent wars of nationalliberation failed to achieve in any lasting way, was broughtto light by the events of 1968 as the immediate possibility ofcollective consciousness and action. Yes, communism is pos-sible. It is true, more now than ever, that it haunts the oldworld. 1968 revealed the fragility of the social contractsinstalled successively to contain the revolutionary move-ments of the beginning of the century, those which followedthe big crisis of 1929 and the movements which accompa-nied and followed the second great imperialist war.However one views the events of 1968, it is undeniable thatthey revealed the failure of this social compromise to elimi-nate or supersede the antagonistic contradictions of the cap-italist systems.

We will now examine the three series of material trans-formations which concern the quality, the dimensions, andthe form of capitalist producing, and by doing so, high-light those new objective starting points from which anyeffort to change society will have to begin.

The quality of producing. The struggle between theworking classes and those of the capitalist and/or socialist

33

bosses had resulted in a system of production that was moreconcentrated and massified. The impossibility of rationallyovercoming crises, which revealed the social polarization ofpower, led to the efforts at managing the strongly central-ized, planned economies, both capitalist and socialist. In thisnew environment, the classical law of value no longer oper-ated as an expression of the relation between concrete reallabor and amounts of money needed to secure an existence.The new version of the law instead related huge masses ofabstract or undifferentiated labor to the ethereal informa-tion machines which supplant industrial production. Laboris deterritorialized without foundation or meaning, it neu-rotically succumbs to a process which deprives workingpeople of knowledge even as it is essentially knowledge cre-ating activity in the first place. Modern work was creating aglobal, infernal disciplinary apparatus, in which the con-straints were invisible: educational and information con-straints which placed the worker at all times under the swayof capital. No longer an eight hour wage slave, the workernow produced and consumed continuously for capital.Capital in the process became more socialized, advancingsocial cooperation, integrating the collective forces of laboreven as it turned society into a giant factory, in which thepacified consuming classes were organized into unions.

Deterritorialized production signifies that work and lifeare no longer separate; society is collapsed into the logic andprocesses of capitalist development. The consequences ofthis assimilation of society to work are profound: All theguarantees and resources of the welfare state (wage sys-tems, unemployment insurance, family assistance, pensionsetc. were intensified, but now they became part of the pro-duction process itself, rather than social defenses againstcapitalist dislocations. Social welfare in fact became a socialdream: as the production process remade society in its ownimage, that high degree of abstraction was transferred tosocial life. Production now conferred membership in socie-ty. As the independent variable, production stamps societywith its characteristic, leaving no region untouched. An


equation is established, in which capitalist advancement andexploitation are seen as essential features of social machin-ery that this is the meaning of society, and of course it hasbecome true

The political consequences of this transformation areequally profound. A high degree of political mobilization,evident in the demand for political participation growingout of a century of revolution and class consciousness, hasexpanded but then dissipated into a social consciousness.All the efforts of the bosses, who are conscious of this newsocialization, consist of maintaining it either through dem-ocratic or totalitarian means within the framework ofinstitutions and of rules for dividing the social product,which permit them to reproduce and thus to reinforce theircommanding positions, in a manner that transforms eco-nomic into political power.

Before examining the consequences of this transforma-tion of command, it is important to recognize another essen-tial aspect of the changing character of production. Theemergence of socialization as a crucial component of pro-duction has naturally affected the production process itself.Socialization, typically viewed as a formal quality, mutatesinto a substantive one: One may observe, for example, howthe socialization of rural peasants accompanies their loss ofindependence, or how service sector workers lose socialcohesion as they are functionally absorbed into rigid, mech-anized production processes. Up to this point, however, theindustrial modes of production associated with capitalismand socialism had only taken possession of social inequali-ties from the outside, so to speak. The great conflagration of1968 demonstrated that the new economic techniques nowimplicated the domain of social reproduction. Before then,the world of production was based on exchange values(commodity production) and the reproduction of use value(utility). All that is over. In this regard, one could considerthe movements of that period as necessary preliminaries

Now the remaining private sphere family, personal life,free time, and perhaps even fantasy and dreams

The Revolution Began in 1968 / 35

everything from that point on became subjected to the semi-otics of capital. This transformation took place regardless ofpolitical climate: democratic, fascist, socialist. Socializedproduction succeeded in imposing its law, its logic, on everyfacet of social life on earth, vampiristically appropriatingfree time, the lifeblood of humanity.

The events of 1968 posed themselves as an antagonisticrecognition of this transformation of the social quality ofproduction and work procedures. In a chaotic but nonethe-less convincing way, they revealed the fundamental contra-diction at the base of these transformations, that of confer-ring an immense productive capability to humanity while atthe same time imposing a new proletarian destiny. This des-tiny originated in permanent expropriation, in the deterrito-rialization that allows no home base, no solidarity, norecourse, no guarantees, and extends not only throughoutsocial life but into the unconscious.

Generalized exploitation, at all levels of society, had theeffect of redefining production as the source of new, supple-mental sources of unhappiness, and correspondingly newforms of political, even micro-political conflict. The newmodes of production integrative, totalizing, subtly totali-tarian effectively transformed the old modes of economicslavery into thinly disguised cultural and political subjec-tion. A struggle ensued, which attempted to reduce allresistance against the supposed economic necessity to pow-erlessness. But it is precisely this transfer of totalitaristobjectives to the minute, molecular levels of everyday exis-tence which gives rise in turn to new forms of resistance onthese most immediate levels, throwing into relief the entireproblem of individual and collective isolation.

In 1968, this new reactivity expressed itself in the formof a tremendous short circuit. It would be useless to try tomystify these events, as the softheads of recovery have tried.It would be useless at this point to stigmatize the return ofthe great monsoons of irrationality. And what would suchreferences to rationality signify anyway, in a world in whichfunctionalism is strictly geared toward capital, which in


itself constitutes a maximization of irrationality? The ques-tion which remains posed since 1968 is rather that of know-ing how to establish a creative and liberating relationbetween happiness and instrumental reason.

From 1968 on, we have also witnessed an inversion ofthe cycle of struggles against colonialism and underdevelop-ment, and some attempts at internal modernization haveappeared, on the part of the more dynamic sectors of thecapitalist and socialist bourgeoisies. But there is a big differ-ence between these ideological efforts lip service, basical-ly and the realities of exploitation and new forms of con-crete resistance.

1968 expresses the actual reopening of a critical con-sciousness, itself the crystallization of objective changeswithin the workforce and production generally. This recog-nition appeared at first as rebellion, and as a new openingitself made possible by economic growth, its impasse, crisis,and the consequent reflexes of rejection. The essential forceof 1968 resides in the fact that for the first time in the histo-ry of human revolts against exploitation, the objective wasnot simple emancipation, but a true liberation, extendingbeyond the removal of obvious, individual chains. Themovements attained a global level reflected in a heightenedconsciousness of the historical linkage of singular struggles.For the first time at that level of intensity, the molar macro-cosms and the molecular microcosms the global and thelocal began to combine in the same subversive whirlwind.

The events of 1968 thus mark the reopening of a revolu-tionary cycle. Not by the repetition of old slogans, butthrough the intervention of new perspectives on action, andby a redefinition of communism as enrichment, diversifica-tion of community and consciousness. Certainly the move-ment remained inseparable from the development of previ-ous social struggles, and the redeployment of the employerscapacity for resistance and attack, but an important histori-cal qualitative leap nevertheless occurred. At that point ofindividual radical fulfillment, what was required to general-ize revolution among a significant portion of the


population? Nothing short of a social cyclotron: the genera-tion of an immense collective energy, the acceleration ofideas and emotions. In 1968, a revolution worthy of themost authentic aspirations of humanity was born.

II. BEYOND POLITICSAt the time of these movements, the refusal by living

social labor of the organization of profit-based capitalismand/or socialism began to spread into the political arena.From a multiplicity of singular conflicts a grand oppositionarose, directly confronting the political power responsiblefor administering social production. Traditional politicsfound itself completely cut off from this mass movement ofcollective consciousness; it shared no ground with the trans-formation of subjectivity. Traditional politics succeeded ingrasping it only from the outside, by attempting to stall,repress, and finally to restructure and recover on its own.But by this very misapprehension and denial, it merelydemonstrated its own powerlessness.

Politics today is nothing more than the expression of thedomination of dead structures over the entire range of livingproduction. A short time ago, at the end of the great revolu-tionary periods, history witnessed similar political restora-tions, which had no other goal than to cover the funda-mental absence of legitimacy on the part of the elites whoregained power. The princes who govern us seem to havereturned, in the most absurd of ways, on the same perverseand empty stages, in the same vicious cycles which appearedin the aftermath of the Great Revolution and theNapoleonic epoch. (It is sufficient here to cite TheCharterhouse of Parma.)

And Hegels remark comes to mind: This temple decid-edly lacks religion, Germany lacks metaphysics, Europehumanity, reformism imagination

On the other hand, the collective imagination remainsalive, but it can no longer conceive of politics outside of theparadigms and avenues of change which began to appear in1968.


This is true first of all for the traditional left. The histor-ical communist parties, prisoners of antiquated paradigmsof production, did not even succeed in imagining the revo-lutionary force of the social mode of production which wasin the process of emerging. Incapable of separating them-selves from centralist organizational models deriving from aparadigmatic split between the avant-garde and the masses,they found themselves disoriented and frightened in the faceof the unexpected self-organization of a social movement.

Loyal to the one-dimensional destiny of the reformistmovement, they experienced the explosion of new demandsin the workplace, and of new desires in the socioculturalworld, as a catastrophe which literally left them in a para-noid state. The same applies to a lesser degree to social dem-ocratic forces.

In the actually existing socialist countries, the reactionwas extremely brutal, while in the West, it was more insidi-ous, maneuverable, willing to compromise. In all of theseinstances, one finds the same invariants: social conser-vatism, combined with a systematic corporatist effort tochannel and co-opt struggles; political reaction, combininga recourse to state power with an appeal to traditional struc-tures, in an attempt to reestablish the legitimacy of the oldelites; the squandering of collective subjectivity, in par-ticular through intense use of the mass media, governmentalagencies, and the welfare state as a whole.

In fact, the left parties have been devastated by theeffects of the movement of 1968 and, even more so, by thecollective-singular movements which have emerged sincethen as the bearers of social transformation. The left hasattached itself even more to the traditional statist structures;and in doing so it has jettisoned its own relationship of con-flict and compromise, and thus its own basis of legitimacy.But these structures were irrevocably altered by the count-er-attacks of 1968; from then on, the old politics could nolonger hide its cadaverous face. The constitutional and insti-tutional structures of developed countries east and west findthemselves to be doubly undermined: from the inside, by


their severe inability to adapt; and from outside, by the newforms of labor protest, reflected in the increase of marginaland part-time precarious workers, as well as other numer-ous minorities who reject the status quo. This impasse hasprecluded any possibility of renewal.

All progressive capitalist perspectives, which wouldhave involved increased popular participation, were system-atically blocked. Constitutional structures, whether they becapitalist or socialist, democratic or totalitarian, have cer-tainly experienced change, but typically in negative terms,always cut off from social movements whose effects theyendure, and always by mystifying the actual operation of thesystem of political representation.

Attempting to respond to this decline in the institutionsof popular political representation, power has resorted totechniques of anticipation and substitution, opting for sym-bolic simulation, adaptation and control. At the momentwhen the whole of society was finally absorbed into produc-tion, and the entirety of working and everyday life wasexposed as fundamentally political, that political characterwas repressed, denied and manipulated. What a gothic sortof society which can maintain as its only ideal a vision ofcastles and courts completely removed from all real life,these small aristocratic universes which are blind to the newaspirations for freedom, new territorialities striving forautonomy! But how else can one describe these politicalaristocracies when, from their fortresses, they attempt toimpose a stratification of society, devoid of consistency, sub-stituting instead a general arrogance, an indifferent cruelty?

Disease, corruption, plague and madness spread withinthese closed universes just as they did in the ruling housesof the ancien regime. But their time is running out: we are atthe threshold between suffering and the moment when his-torys potential will realize itself. The paralysis of politicalstructures and all the current governmental difficulties areboth symptoms and specific traits of moribund power for-mations; they are incapable of adjusting to the movementsof society.


There is no doubt that these problems were initiated bythe movements of the 1960s. In fact, that was the momentwhen the surging tide of social struggles arrived at historyscenter stage. Since that time, as we shall see, the attempts toregain control of the situation have been numerous. Butthey were all short-lived because the political crisis was not,as the reactionary right assumed, the result of simple eco-nomic imbalances, having nothing to do with politics, butrather due to the inability of institutions to transform them-selves. The roots of the crisis of politics were social. Thecurrent silence of the political forms of opposition reflect acurious neutralization: a canceling out effected by the mutu-al interference of different components of social production,each of which is itself thoroughly disturbed and undergoingtransformation. The so-called death of politics, of whichone hears so much, is only the expression of a new worldwhich is emerging and which employs new and differentmodes of material and cultural self-valorization eitherthrough entirely external means or peripherally to the dom-inant power formation, but which, in any event, are antago-nistic to it. It is thus a world in the process of change whichbegan its expansion in 1968 and which, since then, througha process of continuous mutation, including all sorts of fail-ures and successes, has struggled to weave a new networkof alliances at the heart of the multiplicity of isolated singu-lar components comprising it.

This is the new politics: the need to recharacterize thefundamental struggles in terms of a continuous conquest of(new) arenas of freedom, democracy, and of creativity. And,whatever the militants and the intellectuals who have givenup on all that may say, there is nothing anachronistic or ret-rograde or anarchist in this way of conceiving things;indeed, it attempts to understand contemporary socialtransformations including their contradictions on thebasis of the productive activities, the desires, and the realneeds which regulate them. What is on the other handentirely irrational and mad is the power of the State, as ithas evolved since the 60s, into a sort of lunar Stalinism


which only multiplies ad nauseam its rigidity and its institu-tional paralysis. The ferocious will to a death of politics isnowhere more dominant than in the glacial palaces ofpower.

Although much of it is empty and mystified, this type ofpower is nonetheless terribly effective. Moreover, oneshould not underestimate or overlook the great mass of painand anguish that lies concealed behind its cynicism and itstechnocratic indifference: the insecurity of everyday life, theprecariousness of employment, the fragility of civil rights,and, perhaps most of all, the impossibility of locating mean-ing in individual and collective life, the de facto banning ofcommunitarian projects, of all creative becomings fromestablishing themselves on their own terms. This pain,which accompanies the lack of humanity in the capitalistbrand of subjectivity, can be converted into an infinite arrayof reaction formations and paradoxical symptoms: inhibi-tions, evasions of all sorts, but sabotage as well, the transfor-mation of refusal into hatred. This to-and-fro movementreaches its limit when the fear of destruction articulates aconsciousness of the madness of power; then the pain itselfbecomes the vertigo of annihilation. This monstrous will todeath in all its different forms today constitutes the truecharacter of politics and the true cause of human misery.

III. THE NEW SUBJECTIVITIESSince the 1960s, new collective subjectivities have been

affirmed in the dramas of social transformation. We havenoted what they owe to modifications in the organization ofwork and to developments in socialization; we have tried toestablish that the antagonisms which they contain are nolonger recuperable within the traditional horizon of thepolitical. But it remains to be demonstrated that the innova-tions of the 1960s should above all be understood within theuniverse of consciousnesses, of desires, and of modes ofbehavior. It is on this level that the changes became defini-tively irreversible. These new modes of consciousness haveliterally dislocated the old scenarios of class struggle by


invading the imaginary and cognitive roots of productiveactivity, transforming the consciousness that corresponds tothat activity into an act of transformative individual will.Along the way this individuation of desire has thus spreadto the realm of collective practices, which now constitute thenew political territories. The dramatic and tumultuous affir-mation of desire puts our social living into question andmakes it the basis of a higher subjective expression of theensemble of material and semiotic systems of production. Itsopposition to private property is a radical negation of allforms of blind collectivism in capitalist and/or socialistundertakings, and its refusal of work on command actuallyexpresses the will of a higher level of social production.

All seeming connections between this refusal and themassification of social subjectivity must be broken; the rela-tion must be reduced to a paradox, by virtue of which thepoverty of this massification is confronted with the most sin-gular processes of subjective will.

Communism has nothing to do with the collectivist bar-barism that has come into existence. Communism is themost intense experience of subjectivity, the maximization ofthe processes of singularization individuation which rep-resent the capability potential of our collective stock. Nouniversality of man can be extracted from the nakedabstraction of social value.

Communism no longer has anything to do with any ofthis. It is a matter rather of manifesting the singular as mul-tiplicity, mobility, spatio-temporal variability and creativity.That today is the only value on the basis of which one canreconstruct work. A work which no longer is crystallized inthe form of private property, which does not consider theinstruments of production as ends in themselves, but asmeans for attaining the happiness of singularity and itsexpansion in machinic rhizomes abstract and/or concrete.A work which refuses hierarchical command and which indoing so poses the problem of power, clarifies the functionsof deception and exploitation in society, and refuses all com-promise, all mediation between its own existence and


productivity. (All of which implies redefining the concept ofwork as the transformations and arrangements of produc-tion within the frame of immediate liberation efforts.) Newmodalities of collective subjectivity themselves bring togeth-er these qualities and these desires which change relative toproductivity. The new production of subjectivity conceivesof power from this point on solely as an horizon of the col-lective liberation of singularities and as work orientedtoward that end in other words, as self-valorization andself-production of singularities.

The social struggles which exploded in 1968 and in theyears following conferred a tremendous power on the com-ing-to-awareness of students and young people, thewomens movement, the environmental and nature firstmovements, the demand for cultural, racial and sexual plu-ralism, and also the attempts to renovate the traditional con-ceptions of social struggle, beginning with that of workers.All too often these experiences have been described in termsof marginality. Marginality was quickly drawn toward thecenter, and the minoritarian demands succeeded with dif-ficulty in detaching themselves from those of the lifelessmiddle ground. And yet each of them, by following its owncourse and by articulating its own discourse, potentiallyrepresents the needs of the large majority.

Potentially, but in a way that is not any the less effica-cious: By taking hold of society as a whole, productivesocialization wanted to confer on individuals, communities,and their reciprocal relations the character of universality.But the universality with which they were decked out did-nt suit them in the least! Instead of a well-fitting hat, it is amask, a cowl which only disfigures the expression of theirneeds, their interests, and their desires. It is not a paradoxto say that only the marginalities are capable of universality,or, if you prefer, of movements which create universality.Universal politics are not capable of any transcendent truth;they are not independent of the games of economic valoriza-tion; they are inseparable from specific territories of powerand of human desire. Political universality cannot therefore


be developed through a dialectic of ally/enemy as the reac-tionary Jacobin tradition competitively prescribes. Truthwith a universal meaning is constituted by the discovery ofthe friend in its singularity, of the other in its irreducibleheterogeneity, of the interdependent community in therespect for its appropriate values and ends. This is themethod and the logic of the marginalities which are thus theexemplary sign of a political innovation corresponding tothe revolutionary transformations called forth by the cur-rent productive arrangements.

Every marginality, by placing its stakes on itself, is there-fore the potential bearer of the needs and desires of the largemajority. Before 1968, the problem of reproductionremained marginal in relation to production. The womensmovement has made it central. Although the questions relat-ing to the preparation of the abstract and immaterial laborforce remained lateral in relation to the factory labor force,the student movements made them central in the same wayas the new needs which the theoretical and aesthetic imagi-nation proposed. The emerging collective consciousnesscame thereby to see itself as the nodal articulation of a mul-titude of marginalities and singularities; it began to confirmits power on the scale of a significant social-experience,which did not close back on itself or conclude, but whichopened out onto further struggles, the proliferation ofprocesses of collective singularization and the infinitely dif-ferentiated phylum of their ongoing transformation.

This imagination of liberation thus undertook, with moreor less success, to superimpose and to impose itself onthe fiction of the dominant realities. Its lines of collectivefeeling, its new softness, its capacity to bring together themost immediate preoccupations with the broadest socialdimensions demonstrated that the emerging forms of pro-duction were not the enemy of desire, liberation, and cre-ativity, but only of the capitalist and/or socialist organizationof work for profit. Human goals and the values of desiremust from this point on orient and characterize production.Not the reverse. During this period, the production of


liberation became the foremost goal. It will probably takesome time before one can grasp the full significance of whatwas then at stake. To repeat, it had nothing at all to do withutopianism, but with the intrinsic reality of that historicalperiods social movement. It was probably the womensmovement, with its extraordinary power of development,which, after 1968, most advanced the new synthesis of theconcept of production and of social liberation. For the firsttime, with that degree of lucidity, production for profit andwork for the reproduction of the species were overturned,revolutionized on the basis of the most extreme singularity,that of the total conception of the child and of generating anew softness to life.

But this incredible experience was also a symbol: therevolution was understood as an optimization of singulari-ties, as the beginning of a mobilization against the disasterof the current situation and its forms of command. The cor-poreality of liberation became primary. Insurrection of bod-ies as an expression of subjectivity, as incarnating the mate-riality of desires and of needs, as promising in the future theimpossibility of separating the collective character of eco-nomic development from the singularity of its ends.Insurrection of bodies, meaning the successful liberation ofthose immense productive forces which humanity, up to thispoint, only turned against itself. 1968 represents the subjec-tive side of production; this is an interpretation, on a largescale, of its social texture, which displaces the previouspolitical problematics onto the terrain of representation con-sidered as a singular project of liberation.

1968 is also a magnificent reaffirmation of democracy.The fact that it was crossed by a certain naive Rousseauism,that through it a few last champions of Jacobinism and of adisfigured Leninism came to shine forth for a few moments,doesnt in any way detract from the power of democracy inthe movement considered in itself. It showed that the prole-tariat, from this point on, socialized and singularized, wouldnot be able to comprehend a political movement except onthe condition that it is founded on democratic arrangements


in action. This was not only a theoretical truth but also aconcrete historical affirmation: there is no specific form offreedom which is not attached to the group goals of themovement and lived, experienced, by its members. This newgiven was underscored in a certain way, ontologically, in thegeneration which came after 1968. And which wants todayto send us back to the school of Anglo-American liberalismand its ideas of the marketplace! Anticapitalism and anti-socialism have become the only forms which permit a ren-aissance of democracy.


3. THE REACTION OF THE 1970S: NOFUTURE

I. INTEGRATED WORLD CAPITALISMA restructuring of power helped to restore the command

mechanisms in the 1970s, and to restart the process of cap-italist and socialist productive accumulation. Politics andeconomics, capital and the state, were now completely inte-grated. The process developed in two directions.

In the first place, as the international integration ofnational economies on an increasingly world scale, and theirsubordination within a polycentric and rigorously plannedproject of control. We call this figure of command whichcoordinates yet exasperates the unity of the world market,submitting it to instruments of productive planning, mone-tary control, political influence, with quasi-statist character-istics, Integrated World Capitalism (IWC). In this process,world capital integrates, besides the developed countriesand directly dependent on them, the ensemble of real social-ist countries, and controls, in addition, the means by whichthe economies of numerous Third World countries areabsorbed, putting in question their previous position ofperipheral dependence. Indeed, statist command and thenational states thus undergo a veritable deterritorialization.Integrated World Capitalism is not limited to recomposing,using new forms of unification, the flux and hierarchies of

48

statist powers in their traditional sense. It generates supple-mentary statist functions which are expressed through anetwork of international organizations, a planetary strategyof the mass media, rigorous taking control of the market, oftechnologies, etc.

It is certainly important to avoid an ingenuous or anthro-pomorphic conception of IWC which would entail describ-ing it as the work of a Leviathan or as a one-dimensionalmacro-structure of the Marcusean variety. Its planetaryexpansion, as well as its molecular infiltration, occurthrough mechanisms which can be extremely flexible andwhich can even take contractual forms. Each one engageslegal forms that rely on continuous procedures rather thanconstraining substantive law. But it is no less true that it isthis very procedural and regulatory continuum of relationswhich consolidates the centripetal tendency of the system,by diluting and negotiating the effect of crises in time andspace and by relativistically reterritorializing each singularprocess.

In the second place, and conditioning the constitutionof this global integration, the restructuring aims at themode of production and the ensemble making up the col-lective labor force which relates to it. This deterritorializa-tion and this integration was facilitated by rendering thesocial into data form, i.e. on the basis of the fundamentalcomputerization [informatisation] of society. Exploitationcould thus be articulated scientifically over the entirearena of the social, extending the control of profit creationmechanisms. Under these conditions, the assembly line ofcommercial and industrial production spreads its fabricover the social, not in its symbolic sense but materially.Society is no longer merely subsumed by capitalist com-mand; it is absorbed entirely by the integrated mode ofproduction. Differences in productivity and in levels ofexploitation can then be articulated in a smoother, morediffuse way within each geopolitical segment according toregion, country, or continent. Competition, the key link inthe bourgeois market, is no longer very important for this

The Reaction of the 1970s / 49

process of capitalist retraining.The transnational computerization of the social is con-

cerned with only one form of competition: that which it canprovoke between workers and between the different strataof the working class and of the proletariat. It thus becomespossible for Integrated World Capitalism to activate specif-ic techniques of analysis and control of social classes which now make struggles erupt, now pulverize their powerat those points where their level of politicization is signifi-cant, or, on the contrary, unleash them in a controlled wayat those points where the problems of economic take off andof political reform are posed most urgently.

As it has always been in the history of capital, this reno-vation of the forms of command by Integrated WorldCapitalism goes hand in hand with a redefinition of the wayssurplus value is extracted (computerization of the workprocess, spread of social control through mass media, sub-jective integration by governmental apparatuses, etc).

And as it has always been in the history of the exploita-tion of workers struggles, this leap forward of the organiza-tion of work and of the state was anticipated by the move-ments of the class struggle. The forms of social subjectivitywhich emerged in 1968 gave rise to a weaving of molecularstruggles for liberation which are concerned with objectivesthat are at once immediate and long-term, local, everyday,trivial, yet engaged nevertheless with the future of humani-ty on a global scale. This operation was of course very com-plex and, in many respects, impossible to sum up within theframework of a single historical sequence.

It is no less true that the pseudo-progressive dialectic ofcapitalism which triumphed after the second world war wasthus completely blocked. After 1968, the dynamic betweenthe different functions of capital (constant and variable) andthe interaction between the class of capitalists and the socialwork force has radically changed context; this is a result ofthe emergence of increasingly important, heterogeneousarrangements of subjectivity and sensibility. The law ofvalue has ceased to function if it ever worked in the


manner in which it was described along with norms ofeconomic proportionality and even the ordinary modalitiesof simple class exploitation. The social hegemony of the newproletarian subjectivities, once it was affirmed, had toacquire the quality of irreversibility: no longer would any-thing be able to prevent it from revealing itself, regardless ofthe prevailing relations of force, the highs and the lows;indeed, particularly on the front of their affirmation in themass media, no longer can anything prevent these subjectiv-ities from being basic reference points for future struggles.Capitalist and/or socialist restructuration does not automat-ically refer to relatively rational laws. It is not scientific nomatter how sophisticated the theoretical devices and theinstruments of prediction which it employs: it is essentiallyrepressive. The computerization [informatisation] of thesocial is inseparable from its mechanization and its milita-rization, in such a way that the systematic production ofinformation tends to be substituted for the search for it.Such are the zones of strategic importance that the circuitsof reproduction which support life and the struggle aremore and more controlled, ordered, and, ultimately,repressed in

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