"Speech at the European Social Forum, Paris, November 2003"

Toni Negri

[On Thursday 20 November 2003 the Global Radio-Padova website published the
text of Toni Negri's speech at the European Social Forum in Paris. The
original Italian text can be found on their website at
Global. Translated by Ed Emery.]

"I am Italian, so I shall speak in Italian -- particularly because I too
would like to begin by remembering with sympathy and with much emotion the
Italians who have died in Iraq in recent days. Italians have not been used
to having war-dead, not since fascism sent many of our friends and relations
into the monstrous adventures of the Second World War. The last thing we
needed was for a democratic regime to overturn the very terms of the Italian
constitution by sending poor wretches to die in a war which the vast
majority of Italians do not understand the reasons for, and which they
oppose.As our parents' generation said, expressing their anti-fascism: damn those
who sent our brothers to war during the world war, so we too say damn those
who sent these men to die in Iraq today: damn them, damn them, damn them.

It should be said that all this has brought about a further terrible split
between the peace movement and all those in Italy who have supported this
war. Among the latter I include a sizeable proportion of the Left, because
just as we must never forget that a section of the Italian Left fully
supported the war in Kosovo, so too we cannot forget that a large part of
the Italian Left was willing to vote (after a period of laborious
abstention) for the renewed posting of Italian troops in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

These are things which we cannot forget, and it is only on the basis of this
non-forgetting that we can reconstruct a Left in Italy -- and I say
"reconstruct a Left" because I think that the problem of global war is not
simply the problem of struggling against this war, and struggling against
all the imperialist and neo-colonial leftovers that are going around in the
world; it also means arriving at an understanding of what is a new moment in
the general political behaviours of capital in the world of globalisation.

War as it is presented to us today is not simply an attempt by certain US
elites to get their hands on oil (although it is certainly also that); war
is not simpy an operation of intervening in the situation in the Middle East
in order to make possible further political operations (although it is
certainly also that). War as it has been invented, applied and developed
today is a constituent war. A "constituent war" means that the form of war
is no longer simply the legitimation of power. War becomes the external and
internal form through which all the operations of power, the organisation of
power at the global level, are being developed.

War is something which has to do with all the action of power, of worldwide
power, of global power, and this is the form in which we have to fight
against this war.

We must oppose this war, understanding that within it, within its very form,
it is a constituent war, a biopolitical war which affects the entirety of
the ordering of life, of the production and reproduction of life. This war
is a war which saw itself as a policing war, which sought to transform the
intervention of the US armed forces into a ductile, flexible capacity for
intervening easily and quickly in all parts of the world.

It was a war which sought to present itself as no longer a war between
states and other states, but a war against a public enemy, a war against an
internal reality which progressively came to be defined as dangerous. In
short, a war which involved the social relation in the fullest sense of the
term.

What Ignacio Ramonet was saying at the start [of this meeting] about,
precisely, the superimposition of economic war, social war and military war
is perfectly correct. These are things which form a whole, and they form a
whole because there is a constituent organisational project running through
this mode of making war. This is no longer the old imperialist war which
sets out to expand the powers of single nations; rather it is a war in the
name of global capital. It is a war that moves as global organisation, and
this is what we need to understand today. I'm thinking of what we have in
Italy, with evocations of patriotism, of the nation, of what are supposed to
be the great traditional values of Italian culture. These values are no
longer our values -- these values of patriotism and the nation were never
values for the true communist tradition, nor are they today, and neither
will they be in the future, ever.

We are truly and fundamentally internationalists, but we can only be
internationalist to the extent that, and when, we understand that today we
have this empire in the process of formation, and that it is against its
military power -- as well as its economic, ideological and political power --
that we have to fight.

We must fight against this fundamental unity [of factors], and obviously
this is the next transition that we have to make.

What does it mean, to make this transition? It means that against this war --
which is foundational, and constitutive -- we must oppose political
positions, we must oppose actions, and it is clear that peace as a value is
not a "take it or leave it" thing.

Peace has become a value which is absolutely fundamental in the entirety of
our actions: our active disobedience is a disobedience which wants to pose
itself truly in terms of peace, a disobedience which is active and if
possible non-violent: I say "if possible non-violent" because in our
struggle for democracy we cannot re-enact the totalitarian, violent
character of capitalist power.

We really do have to break the homology of a struggle for power which
re-enacts the characteristics of power; we absolutely must move by
reconquering the terms of peace as a foundational and constitutive element
in itself: herein is a truly alternative constitution of our perspective.

Naturally we know perfectly well that if it had not been for the plagues in
Egypt Moses would never have been able to make the exodus from the country
where his people had been kept in slavery. We know perfectly well that if it
had not been for the Aaron's rearguard they probably would not have
succeeded in opening up the Red Sea. Therefore we know that it is necessary
to resist, and that our resistance is not always "nice". But we also know
that our strength and our capacity for aggregating, for pulling things
together, is achieved first and foremost via an active and non-violent
disobedience, and this really must be an element that we take upon
ourselves. And I believe that when we launch, from this impressive meeting,
a continuing battle against the occupation by the capitalists in Iraq,
against everything that has happened, and against war in general, we must be
sure to keep this form present.

If it is true that capitalist development today uses war in order to
organise the world -- and thus to hierarchise it, operate selection in it, and
practise inclusion/exclusion, as it is attempting to do -- then we must
obviously transform our struggle for peace into a social struggle: it is not
possible to separate the struggle for peace from the social struggle, and
that brings us back to the basic problem, which is that of how to
reconstruct a Left, a Left which is capable of being pacifist, but which at
the same time knows how to put forward elements "in common" -- putting
forward the big values that really are reconstructive of a democratic
society in which democracy is not a democracy of the few, but a democracy of
all, and for all.

So, in my opinion these are the feelings and -- in the view of many comrades
in Italy -- also the guiding lines of our action and our thinking.

Thank you.