"From Municipalities and Social Movements:

Roads and Suggestions for a New Europe"

Toni Negri

[A call from July 7, 2003]

I think that this assembly must organize itself form now on into a constitutive assembly. We have in front of us deadlines that have been determined in a short period. They are the approval of the convention on the part of the governments under the direction of Berlusconi and the European Social Forum.

We need, today, to organize ourselves in every situation of the movement in Italy, and wherever, a capacity of reasoning in the terms of federalism, of the rights tied to work and immigration, which is to say to the citizenship of work and universal citizenship, that can meet in the forms of multitude expressions that we have begun to know on the since the movement of Seattle.From today on, we have the necessity of reflecting amongst ourselves in every political occasion around the possibility of determining not a lobby of pressure in respect to the development of the work of the convention, which cannot become a subordinate element, but a constitutive element of invention, of concrete definition. We have to be able to express the positions to put into all of the political positions starting from the fundamental, which are the communities where we live. We need to make the internal force of the movement converge to the themes that are its own political objectives. We are at the point in which the neck of the bottle is constricting and we need to pop the top. Massimo’s contribution was extremely important because it revealed that there are internal contradictions in the institutions. It is an indication that offers us the meeting spaces/possibilities with forces that are not simply those of the movement. The movement has matured: if we avoid the vices of self-gratitude, we have the possibility of comprehending which are the possible forces. It not only concerns the material force, it concerns a conceptual force, of an impossibility of being summarized in the diagrams of the containment of power, of producing things that, however small, do not enter into the dynamics of command. There are elements or refusal, of excess that are those that effectively put into crisis this mechanism of power and it is evident that all of the insistence made here, (but that are sacred because they are the same form on which the movement is constituted), on federalism, and on the communities becomes essential because it is there that they invent themselves.

How can you make this absolutely political gesture, of the decision? There is no longer any Lenin, or any political party behind us, but there is the consolidation of these processes. But, we have to make the consolidation of these processes fly; we have to be able to interpret them in a continuous and systematic manner. And it is today that this might be possible: Europe is necessary because it is a terrain of innovation of a social-political tapestry in front of the Emperor, and it is the only possibility that we have to disarticulate the Empire, of putting into action — not only for ourselves, but probably for Latin American, for Southeast Asia, for entire continents, probably the same for the United States itself — a radical rupture. It is a formidable occasion.

Europe is necessary, but is it possible? It is possible if every single one of these assemblies, from here to the Social Forum of Saint-Denis, becomes a constitutive assembly and if in Rome, when they arrive to constitute the convention, they find a Genoa multiplied by 10.

Gianfranco Bettin — Vice Mayor of Venice, national Vice president of the Verdi

Luca Casarini — Spokesperson for the Movement of the Dissobedienti

Massimo Cacciari — Philosopher, ex-Mayor of Venice

Toni Negri — Philosopher, co-author of the volume Empire, in collaboration with Michael Hardt.