hydrarchist writes:

The following is a dialogue with
Anne DuFourmantelle from Negri's recently published "Abecedaire Politique" (Calmann-Levy 2002), and was translated by Thomas Seay.

E as in Empire

Anne DuFourmantelle: What can you tell us about the
concept of Empire that you developed with Michael
Hardt?

Toni Negri: Our work together has been most of all a
work on linguistic clarification. Indeed, the word
"Empire" might seem ambiguous. It immediately
appeared in political and journalistic vocabularies
and rapidly became static. Nevertheless, by "Empire"
we intend something very precise: the transfer of
sovereignty from Nation-states to a superior entity.
This transfer has almost always been understood in
terms of an "internal analogy", that is to say, as if
Empire were implicitly a nation-state the size of the
world.
Along with this simplification, there is the widely
held notion that Empire corresponds to the United
States. Contrary to this, we emphasize the fact that
the large-scale transfers which are occurring in the
military, monetary, cultural, political and linguistic
spheres cannot be reduced to some internal analogy; it
comes down to the fact that the structure of Empire is
radically different from that of nation-states. The
process which ushered in Empire is in fact founded on
contradictory phenomena: It is founded on the
struggles that the working classes waged against
capital which made the reproduction of the capitalist
system impossible at the national level; It is also
founded on the anti-colonial wars and Vietnam which
gave rise to a massive anti-imperialist upsurge that
shook capital to the core; finally, it is founded on
the crisis of the socialist countries. The socialist
management of capital did not succeed in developing in
face of burgeoning demands for freedom. The
cumulative effect of these processes brought about
disequilibrium on a world level and Empire came into
being amidst multiple extremely violent conflicts.
The imperial process that we describe is therefore
contradictory at once by its origins and by its
development. Today, we have a world-governance that
attempts to establish forms of government that can
permeate the biopolitical fabric of the entire global
citizenry. What interested us in writing this book
was to begin to define the areas of struggle and
counter-power within Empire. What this means first of
all is to put forward some basic demands which
correspond to the new context. In particular I have
in mind three of these. Respond to the present
economic globalization by calling for rights as
citizens of the world. In particular the right to
free movement, the right to a minimum salary (a
citizenship income), the right to re-appropriation,
which is to say, recognition of the fact that
production belongs to the multitude.

First point: the workforce no longer has borders. We
must begin to think as citizens of the world. People
should be able to go where they want, they are
citizens; they should be able to vote there where they
are, there where they work. Free movement has 'til
now been entirely managed by capital, because it needs
cheap labor, and a mobile workforce was essential to
the production of value. We demand that this free
movement become a right of the global citizen.

Second point: a minimum income. A system for
distributing wealth that treats reproduction as
necessary. This includes not only the reproduction of
the workforce but also the reproduction of humanity.
Concretely this means that in as much as social
cooperation and affect make up an integral part of
value production (think of the role of women in
society, as Deleuze said, "there is a future-woman of
work"), we call for the participation of all in the
production of social capital be remunerated. This
means that everybody should have equal access to
health care, knowledge and material wellbeing. The
world can no longer be split into rich and poor,
between productive and unproductive, because
production has thoroughly merged with life itself,
making no division between the two possible. A
guaranteed salary, a citizenship salary, is at once an
end to the mirage of welfare policies and laws over
the poor -- which serve only to re-enforce divisions --
and the end of poverty. Production has become
entirely biopolitical and so life should be
remunerated.

Last point: as life has become the motor of
production, we ask that the multitude -- that is to say,
world citizens -- be permitted to re-appropriate life.
For example, there should be no more copyright. Why
shouldn't knowledge, which is today the main form of
production, be accessible by all?

AF: Is this the end of the idea of the author?

TN: It's the end of the idea of property. While the
idea of the end of material property seems more
complicated, the idea of the end of immaterial
property and production seems much more simple.
Nonetheless, it's the same issue.

AF: These are issues that arise with the Internet and
Napster.

TN: It's not only about the Internet. The Internet
is simply the most visible tip of the iceberg. But
nearly all production nowadays is carried on through
networks of cooperation and exchange. Production
cannot be, at once, based on the circulation of
knowledge and at the same time set limits on access to
that knowledge. And when I say cooperation, I mean
life. Nowadays, work and life, production and
reproduction are entirely inter-mixed. Put another
way, the world's material wealth is passed on through
various forms of collaboration and cooperation, not
just intellectual labor: contacts, relations,
exchanges, desires have become productive. Production
is life itself. It is only in this way that all that
lives enters into the circuits of production. Forms
of monetary exchange, forms of command, the defense of
property become as a result more and more parasitic.
Thirty years ago, they could be denounced in the name
of exploitation. Today it is the paradigmatic shift
of production that demands their suppression. It's a
splendid paradox: capitalism has entered a new phase,
and it is capital itself that will bring about the
promises we made in the 70s but were unable to keep.
I speak of it as a defeat but that's not right: the
metamorphosis of capital is completely the result of
those struggles.

AF: Yet at the same time, to get back to the example
of Napster, they lost.

TN: For now they have lost, but wait and see what
will happen in the coming years.

AF: Isn't there always an attempt to re-establish
property at the center of the debate even when there
is a feeling that the movement is going in another
direction?

TN: Yes. I'm not sure that can go on much longer.
There was a time when access to the Bible was the
exclusive right of the Church: free access to the
Bible was considered dangerous by the authorities.
Today the problem emerges with regard to knowledge in
general, in regards to language. Language has become
the foundation of the living. Everything has become
linguistic and biopolitical. And the powers-that-be
consider dangerous whatever the poor -- meaning those
whose only wealth is their life -- take hold of.

AF: Haven't politics always been biopolitical?

TN: I believe we should be clear on the concept of
biopolitics. "Biopolitics" means precisely the
intertwining of life and power. The fact that power
has chosen to engrave itself on life is not new. What
Foucault calls, "biopower", arrives on the scene,
according to him, at the end of the 18th century. But
resistance to biopower exists. To say that life
resists means that life affirms its potential. By this
we intend that life affirms its capabilities to
create, invent, produce and subjectify. This is what
we mean by biopolitics: life's resistance to power,
resistance to that very power which permeates it. From this point of view, the history of philosophy is,
except for rare exceptions, on the side of biopower.