hydrarchist writes This interview was published in the second issue of Make World Magazine.

Empire’s commercial success indicates how the interpretative proposal
of the book resonates with the reality of the present. The proposal
has become, thorugh agreement or disagreement, a compulsory
point of reference in the debate on the global world. S11
intercepts it, is interrogated by it and interrogates it: especially the
relationship between the form of Imperial sovereignty outlined in
the book and the actual American policy. The latter seems to be
characterised as a traditional imperialist state that aims to redesign
the geo-political borders of the planet by mobilising national
identities more than as global decentred and deterritoiralised Empire
that administers hybrid identities and flexible hierachies with
no recourse to ethnic, national traditions and values.

The clash in the
western mind

Antonio Negri

Empire came out in the US at
the beginning of 2000 and in Italy two years later.
In between the two towers collapsed. One
would have expected the Italian edition to have
an additional chapter on S11 like many other political
books that came out this year. You didn’t
add one, is it because the event was not epochal
or because it did not constitute a surprise for
your thesis?

The event was very relevant but it confirmed one
of the fundamental theses of the book i.e. the
end of American insularity and the difference between
telluric and maritime nations. The fact that
New York could be bombed like London, Berlin
and Tokyo confirmed that the process of formation
of the new global order was fully deployed.
The fact that Al Queda had attacked the symbols
of American economic power was a sign of the
‘civil war’ for imperial leadership. What is absolutely
new with respect to the book’s structure is
the fact that the American reaction is configuring
itself as a regressive backlash contrary to the imperial
tendency. It is an imperialist backlash with-in
and against Empire that is linked to old structures
of power, old methods of command, and a
monocratic and substantialist conception of sovereignty
that represents a counter tendency with
respect to the molecular and relational characters
of the imperial bio-power that we had analysed.
The gravity of the situation today lies in this
contradiciton.

How do you explain it?

S11 occurred the moment when the conservatives
were gaining ground in the U.S. through the
program of safeguarding national interests that
were penalised by the political economic and social
process of construction of empire. The group
that went to power with Bush is exquisitely reactionary,
linked to a populist rather than ultra-liberalist
ideology and to the maintainence of certain
mega structures of American power such as
control of energy and the development of the industrial
military complex. These people have remained
sidelined to the third industrial revolution
and do not want to take it further, they are hostile
to it since the new economy has gone into crisis,
and they have no hypothesis of alternative in
mind other than a return to reliance on tradition.

The contradiction you mention is not a negligible.
It makes the process of costruction of empire
much more accidental than you had described
it…

It is a serious contradiction: it reminds us of the
reaction of nationalisms to the changes of scenery
in the 30s. Anything could happen; the tension
betweeen the growth of the world market and
these regressive pulsations of the American administration
pushes the situation to an extreme
limit.

…With the war as physiological instrument of inter
vention and self-legitimation, Empire had said
this too….

Yes. The war becomes a preventive police operation
– careful, this does not mean that it is softer
than traditional war: for the first time since the
containment the U.S. entertained the idea of using
the atomic bomb. International organisations
are pushed aside without the least decorum, on
the Kyoto protocol as much as the international
criminal tribunal, as well as the war on Iraq.

Will Bush’s administration manage to take forward
this project? If the imperialist backlash is in
such a contradiction with the imperial trend, so
anachronistic, can one hope that it will meet with
obstacles and resistances?

It is difficult to evaluate this: apart from every-thing
there is an element of bluffing in Bush’s behaviour
that is the perfect correlative to Bin Laden’s
bluff. At the level of international politics,
there are signs of a radical refusal of the American
position, both in Europe and – despite the
adherence to the anti-terrorist coalition – in Russia
and China; but there are no leading groups
capable of expressing it and pushing it forward.
The real obstacle to Bush comes more from the
markets: markets don’t want a war.

Are you convinced of this? Wouldn’t the war help
to relaunch the economy?

No. The American economy would only be relaunched
by the second world war, not by a police
operation against Iraq, which would only
have negative effects on savings in the U.S. and
bring confusion to the Islamic markets. Moreover,
contrary to what the early 90s revolution in mili-
tary affairs sustains, it does not contain strong
elements of technologial innovation: it requires
military investments of a traditional kind, despite
the fact that the structure of the army has
changed in the opposite, imperial sense. It is a
full regression at the military level too: it isn’t surprising
that vast sectors of the military apparatus
are contrary to the intervention in Iraq.

What about the social level? What chance does
the umpteenth call to arms have in obtaining the
consensus it needs?

It seems to me that Bush would go to war with a
weak consensus that will not be strengthened by
a call to patriotism. A social crisis is emerging in
the U.S. and the government pretends not to see
it. Bush’s administration took power the moment
when the neo-liberal wave had taken all there
was to take. Then the crisis of the market shares
arrived and in a society of salaries like the American
one where the redistribution of wealth largely
takes place through the financial market, a crisis
of the financial market touches on the low in-comes
and becomes a crisis of the entire community.
Of course in such a situation of potential
social crisis, there emerges the political weakness
of the American system i.e. a system reliant
upon the media and the control of public opinion;
and there are no counter-tendencies with respect
to the governmental trend in the media.

I wouldn’t be so sure about that. The media operate
at the linguistic-symbolic level and at that
level the shifts can be less predictable and faster
then at the political one.

I don’t know. I can’t see significant shifts between
the semiotic and the social. The system of American
media is too closed and self-referential.

Can anything happen at the electoral level? In
November there will be elections for Congress in
the U.S. It is not secondary whether Bush wins or
loses.

Obviously everyone hopes that the Democrats
win, however weak and minimal the alternative
that they would be capable of is. But my impression
is that at the electoral level the essential has
already occurred, and this consists in an important
modification of the very electoral. There are
important sectors of American society who have
moved to the right, firstly the Jewish component,
with the consequent deplacement of the democratic
political class that was traditionally linked
to it. Bush took over an alliance between this Jewish
right and the Christian extreme right, as well
as the Hispanic community. I do not think these
ethnic electoral borders are rigid per se but so
long as the politics of Israel keeps rigidfying them
there is little to do.

What caused this shift to the right of the Jewish
component? Is it a defensive appeal to identity?

It is because the diaspora has lost. The figure of
diaspora, that meant the difference of always being
other and that’s why we liked it, has been defeated.
And this weighs enormously on the Middle
East question, which today really presents
itself as a C19th residue in the global world. We
wrote this in Empire: the end of the socialist revolution
entails processes of re-feudalisation,
more or less similar to what happened after the
reformation. Another backlash: the question is to
understand whether it will be stabilised.

I summarise: S11 revealed so to speak the accomplished
globalistation and the process of imperial
constitution in the making. The political
and military American response is reactionary, it
takes that process backwards and appeals to
forms and methods that are nationalist and imperialist
i.e. anti-imperial, or at least it tries to do
so even though we do not know if it will succeed.
It seems to me that the progressive antibodies,
the forces that can push towards empire you
identify in the markets and multi-national corporations
rather than politics, at least institutional
politics…

I find it also in other contradictions that are
opened up. The militarisation of power for instance:
if the war becomes a constant element of
political legitimation, generals become the true
governers, as we can already see in Bush’s administration
which is full of generals, and since
the armies evolve towards mercenaries, the process
of corruption of imperial strategies can run
very fast. Crisis and corruption are powerful elements
in the erosion of power. They open up to
strategies of opposition and exodus such as the
refusal to pay taxes to finance war expenses.

There is little to be expected from institutional
politics and the weak alternating between right
and left of western democracies. But what about
that you and Hardt called counter-empire, the
multitude? Since S11 the movement of movements
has stopped, especially in the U.S. what
cards does it hold in its hands?

Two: exodus and resistance. And it must play
both. Exodus i.e. abstaining from the game, refusal,
demonstrating that it is on a different side
with respect to the current game, all this is the
radical behaviour that the whole events around
S11 deserve. But at the same time, faced with re-turns
to barbarism, it is necessary to pose resistance
on a terrain of possible encounter with reformists.
The movement can only be constructed
on exodus, but it must also exercise resistance.
This is because power does not let you practice
exodus in peace; it continuously attacks. Hence
either exodus becomes militant and combative or
it loses. You must exercise force even when you’d
rather not, especially when you would rather not:
the adversary imposes it. The problem is to understand
how, how to play the creative surplus of
the multitude in real relations of force. The problem
is to understand which topology of resistance
needs to be designed and which practices – even
singular - to put into practice. How to fight
against the war, which alliances to build with the
imperial reformist aristocracies…all this needs to
be thought about.

There is more if I may. The multitude is made up
of men and women. The freedom gained by women
in the last decades of the C20th already put
into practice exodus from the logic of power. In
feminised societies such as ours [not Italy presumably
– ed] these are relevant to the prediction
of how the game will turn out. A great difference
with respect to the thirties is the possibility
of the lack of feminine consensus to the seduction
of power and the strategies of war. Even
though the backlash is felt at this level too: as
there are backlashes of imperialism on empire,
there are also patriarchal regurgitations at the
end of patriarchy in the east and the west and
these are clearly painful regurgitations. In this
situation it is a question wagering - personally for
instance I feel like betting that the patriarchal
backlash is not a winner on womens freedom.

I see patriarchal regurgitations very well, Bush’s
position is patriarchal, Bin Laden’s too and may-be
even Arafats…but you must be able to concretise
and configure politically the feminine exodus
too. I know very well that the multitude, men and
women, is full of potential, but the situation is
very dramatic and it would not be the first time
that a process full of potential gets blocked and
distorted.

Like many others you focus on Europe in your
project. I’ll make to you the same objection I
made to others. European history is not militant
in favour of an advantage of Europe over the U.S.
in facing the political and social challenges of
the global world. As we read in Empire it is the
American constitution based on open frontiers
and the inclusion of differences to have the upper
hand over the European one made of rigid
frontiers and national identities.

From an historical point of view you are right, but
today Europe is the space given to us for any political
project. This is because it is a space inhabited
by social forces – strata of productive intellectual
labour – that are interested in new social
organisation. If built from below, mobilising the
multitudes, a united Europe can be a terrain on
which to exercise a subversive function of the global
order. Last but not least. Empire is not an
anti-American book even though it does not under
estimate the weight of the U.S. in imperial
strategies. We cannot hide though that today,
also due to the stupidity of the reactionary strategy
of Bush, on the left anti-americanism grows
even amongst the anti-globalisation movement
itself. This seems to me a confused, wrong and
even dangerous position, to you?
I completely agree as it is obvious from what I
have clearly said so far, I am extremely critical of
the American government and any sensical person
could not be otherwise. But to think that
Bush’s government is America does not make any
sense. Despite all that is happening, American
society is still a completely open machine. Therefore
even if Bush’s project is monocratic and imperialist
it is wrong to regard the United States as
such as monocratic and imperialist. But there is
more: the anti-american position coincides with a
position of reevalutation and defense of the nation
state as the anti-imperialist trench – this is a
temptation not extraneous to some sections of
the movement of movements, as we have seen in
Porto Alegre. However this would really be a
wrong posture since it would prevent an under-standing
of how the world is made, who has got
the command and who can subvert it.

Antonio Negri interviewed by Ida Dominijanni
Translated by Arianna Bove/Erik Empson