Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 00:16:43 -0800 (PST)
Subject: an interview with tony negri


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.






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