20081105 11:57:00 redazione-IT<\/p>\n
"We need alternatives to the thought that our only options are either private or public ownership", said Michael Hardt when he presented his and Antonio Negri’s forthcoming book Common Wealth at the European Social Forum in Malm\u00f6 in September. The book elaborates on the theories set out in Empireand Multitude, focusing on the common as an
\nalternative to capitalism and socialism.<\/p>\n
Remi Nilsen: You and Antonio Negri’s upcoming book will be called Common Wealth.<\/p>\n
Michael Hardt: Yes, we just turned in the manuscript to the editors, so it will still be a long time before it comes out.<\/p>\n
One way it functions with us, with these books, is that when we finish
\na book, we start to criticize it. So when we finished Empire we were
\nfeeling that although the concept of multitude was central to us and
\nto the book, we hadn’t developed it enough or in the way we wanted.
\nHence the next book was about "the multitude". So after that book we
\nfelt that the notion of the common was central, but not developed
\nenough.<\/p>\n
It is not that our books are about just one thing \u2013 they end up being
\nabout many things \u2013 but the starting point was "the common", the
\ncommon wealth. Too often are we able to see the world only in terms of
\nprivate and public property. Marx says at a certain point in the 1844-
\nmanuscripts: "Private property has made us stupid." And it has partly
\nmade us stupid in that we can’t recognize the common. We tend to think
\nthat not just private property but also public property has made us
\nstupid in that we are only able to think that the alternative is
\neither private or public ownership. Yet much of the world is still
\ncommon. There’s a lot of discourse about that now, but the notion
\nseems to be used in its pre-modern meaning: the commons, common land,
\ncommon woods, etc. But we’re more interested in universal production:
\nideas, images, social relations… things it’s hard to privatize.
\nWhich is what the multitude has in common, the shared faculties like
\nlanguage, which can’t be privatized…<\/p>\n
Or even when they are privatized, it destroys their productivity. If a
\nlanguage were a private property it wouldn’t be communicative, but in
\nthe same way if it is regulated by the state it looses its capacity
\nfor innovation.<\/p>\n
Language is a good example because it is so quickly destroyed by
\neither private or public property. Another, minor but significant,
\nexample is the Internet, code, and information. The open source
\nmovement has said for a long time: The period of open access to code
\nand information was the period of great creativity and expansion of
\nInternet technologies and development. As things have been privatized
\n\u2013 both information and code \u2013 creativity has been blocked. And
\ngenerally what Negri and I try to understand with the notion of the
\nbiopolitical, or what we sometimes awkwardly call immaterial
\nproduction, is precisely this: ideas, information and code, but also
\nimages, notions, and social relations. One of the hypotheses we try to
\ndevelop is that this mode of production is becoming dominant today, in
\nthe same or similar way that industrial production was in an earlier
\nera. All of those products are tendentially common. It is not that you
\ncan’t privatize information or knowledge, that happens all the time,
\nbut that a) they are difficult to privatize or make public because
\nthey are infinitely reproducible, and b) they loose their productive
\ncapacity when they are privatized.<\/p>\n
So in the same way we think of the common as a different way of
\nthinking private and public property, we want to try to envision an
\ninstitution of the common. The common as a social and political form
\nthat constitutes an alternative to thinking either capitalism or
\nsocialism (capitalism as an expression of private property and
\nsocialism as an expression of public property) which would make the
\ncommon the basis of a commun-ism: the institution of the common as a
\nsocial institution.<\/p>\n
So the upcoming book continues the analysis that we have been doing
\nfor a while now, of trying to understand how production has changed. I
\nthink in traditional terms you would call it an analysis of class
\ncomposition: What is it people do at work? What is work today? How is
\nit organized and structured?<\/p>\n
RN:The upcoming book will then present further examination of Marx’s
\nnotion of the "general intellect" from Grundrisse, but at the same
\ntime it sounds like there is a change involved in the turn towards
\n"the common" rather then "the multitude" and its "relationship of
\nsingularities"?<\/p>\n
MH:I do think there are in some ways new directions in each book, but
\nI do feel like it is a trilogy. It has been a fifteen year long
\nprocess which has resulted in three books, and in each book we try to
\naddress the questions as the are posed, rather than pursuing some
\nradical departure.<\/p>\n
Part of the challenge is to recognize how multiplicity and the common
\nare not only compatible, but also mutually necessary, rather than
\nbeing conflictive. Because normally one thinks of unity and difference
\nas being alternatives; you either have one or the other. Whereas we
\nthink that commonality and multiplicity are philosophically
\ncomplementary.<\/p>\n
RN: When you say that this immaterial mode of production is becoming
\nmore dominant than the industrial, do you see a conflict between this
\nmode of production and the existing one, making the conflict
\npredominantly with the existing capitalist mode of production?<\/p>\n
MH: I do see it that way. Public and private property go hand in hand,
\ncapital always need the state as its mechanism. And what we call
\ncapitalist and socialist states have been different mixtures of
\nprivate and public property. From this perspective, the communality
\nbetween the two looks much closer.<\/p>\n
Maybe you were worried that I was downgrading the conflict with
\ncapital by posing it that way… But I think our political alternative
\nha been impoverished when the only solution we can think of is to make
\nit public property.<\/p>\n
Let me give a slightly more concrete example. The best analysis we
\nhave of neoliberalism shares \u2013 beyond their analysis of the evils of
\nprivatization \u2013 the assumption that it is necessary to impose state
\nsolutions, i.e. either Keynesian or socialist models. I was thinking
\nof the ones I admire the most, which are Naomi Klein’s The Shock
\nDoctrine and David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism. None of
\nthem explicitly say what the alternative is, and I think any critique
\nof neoliberalism should reflect on what alternatives we have, on what
\nwould be different from neoliberalism. Both of them seem to assume
\nthat some form of state regulation and control is the alternative. But
\nI think we need other alternatives because that one doesn’t thrill me.
\nThere must be something better, and I don’t mean this in an absolutist
\nway \u00e0 la "if we could abolish the state tomorrow… ". We need to
\nbroaden our political possibilities.<\/p>\n
RN: In both Empire and Multitude you criticize the notion of
\nsovereignty. Many critics have claimed that the wars in Iraq and
\nAfghanistan have falsified the central premises of these books, in
\nthat the resistance in Iraq for instance is based on an idea of
\nnational sovereignty. But you are still not very enthusiastic about
\nthe resistance in its concrete form in Iraq and Afghanistan?<\/p>\n
MH: The enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend. The fact
\nthat theirs are real and effective efforts against US imperialism
\ndoesn’t necessarily make them good. And even with my limited
\nknowledge, some of them seem quite horrible.<\/p>\n
The hypothesis in Empire \u2013 which I’m actually more and more convinced
\nof; there are other things I doubt more and more \u2013 is not that nation
\nstates no longer matter, or that the functions of the nation states
\nare no longer important, but rather that we have to recognize that
\nthey function within a larger framework, that they are important
\nelements of this network power. It was this that led us to the
\nhypothesis that the US can no longer dictate global order, in fact
\nthat no nation state can do that any more. It is not the case that if
\nthe US isn’t powerful enough, then China, Russia, or some caliphate
\nwill be. No, the terms of sovereignty, of political order, has changed
\nso that no nation state can control them any longer. The Bush lot,
\nCheney and Wolfowitz, thought that they could act like imperialist,
\nthat they could dictate global order. And we have seen little by
\nlittle the demonstration of their failure, of the final burial of
\nunilateralism: first with military failures, then with the social and
\neconomic failures in the US. I take that as evidence of the
\nimpossibility of national sovereignty dictating global order.<\/p>\n
So we have to create a new concept of sovereignty, or maybe a
\ndifferent word than sovereignty, that allows us to think this
\ncollaboration of powers, of political and economic dominant nation
\nstates with corporations and international economic institutions. But
\nthis doesn’t mean that nation states are not important, nor that the
\nUS isn’t important as a force of domination, or that Bolivia isn’t
\nimportant as a demarcation of lines of defence, is just means that
\nthey have to be considered in a larger framework.<\/p>\n
When you think about the struggles in Bolivia that led to Evo’s
\nelection, one of the main starting points was the water war in 2000.
\nIt was a typical neoliberal privatisation story: the world bank told
\nthe Bolivian government at the time that they had to privatise the
\nwater services, because it was costing more than they were making. So
\nthey sold it to a conglomerate foreign corporation, who rationalized
\nthe pricing, which meant they raised the prices to what it actually
\ncost, and this lead to massive protests. Who were the protests
\nagainst? They were against the Bolivian state, but they were also not
\nagainst the Bolivian state. They were against something else. They
\nwere against the Bolivian state in so far as it was an element within
\nthe circuit of international institutions (IMF, The World Bank),
\ninternational corporations, and also, of course, the US and its
\ndictation of a certain kind of neoliberal economic policy.<\/p>\n
RN: And this is your concept in Empire. Much of the criticism after
\nEmpire andMultitude has been that the war in Iraq is classic
\nimperialism. Has the Iraq war changed the basis for your concept?<\/p>\n
MH: No. Maybe I’m stubborn or blind but it has only reinforced it.
\nBush, Cheney, and Wolfowitz were drunk on power, so you could accept
\nthat they thought they were more powerful than they actually were. But
\nthose on the left who also accepted that Bush, Cheney, and Wolfowitz
\nwere more powerful than they were, those are the ones to blame. I
\nthink there was a certain \u2013 and now I’m being uncharacteristically
\nmean \u2013 comfort in this: "We don’t have to think about new concepts, it
\nturns out everything is just as we thought, that it was just US
\nimperialism. We can use all the old terms!" I assume the same people
\nare now able to recognize that this was not the case. I agree with you
\nthat the war in Iraq was a classic imperialist endeavour: It was a
\nclassic imperialist endeavour conducted by a buffoon that was
\nmistaken. To see Bush as anything else is to mistake Napoleon III for
\nhis uncle, as Marx mockingly said about the people in France in 1850s.
\nIt doesn’t mean they are not dangerous; they may even be more dangerous.<\/p>\n
What Bush and his group have proven is that imperialism is dead, they
\nhave shown how impossible it is. Rather than think that the form is
\nstill alive, and we just need a new actor for it, I think the form
\nitself has changed.<\/p>\n
RN: The situation in Georgia looks like a rerun of classical
\nimperialism of the nineteenth century: a contest between four or five
\nactors in which the Caucasus was a central playing field. Is not
\nimperialism coming back to life again now that we have more actors
\ninstead of just one dominant superpower?<\/p>\n
MH: It certainly brings up plenty of memories… But I think that
\nyou’re raising the dead when seeing these echoes of the past and
\ntherefore missing the current situation. When we talk about "empire",
\nit doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be conflicts between the
\naristocrats of this global order, that the capitalist or political
\nfactions aren’t going to want a greater share.<\/p>\n
RN: The current financial crisis concerns private and public property
\nin a very interesting way. How do you see the recent state
\nintervention into private companies?<\/p>\n
MH: One thing I find interesting is that the US, with its
\nneoliberalistic propaganda, has taken a dramatic turn in the last two
\nweeks. The medicines or practices the US has preached or forced others
\nto apply, the US has not applied to its own crisis. The American state
\nhas intervened, not just to defend the American economy, but also the
\ninterests of particular capitalists and of the capitalist system as a
\nwhole. So once again we see this mutual relationship between private
\nand public property, the capitalist state’s central role, that capital
\nis dependent on support from a structure of sovereignty.<\/p>\n
It is difficult to say what this means to us. I don’t know if the so-
\ncalled "general collapse theory" is the right way to understand what
\nis happening. I don’t think believing or hoping this will lead to a
\ngeneral collapse is the right way to go.<\/p>\n
RN: Could this crisis open up for what you in Empire call "the
\nactualisation of the multitude", that the multitude will in itself
\nconstitute a class and thereby a political subject?<\/p>\n
MH: There is this Marxist tradition that separates between objective
\nand subjective crisis. The objective crisis, which is caused by the
\nfunctioning of capital (cyclic crisis, etc.), doesn’t constitute a
\nthreat to capitalism as a whole. While crisis that result from the
\npressure of the working class \u2013 from an expansion of proletarian
\ndesires, which can lead to an inflation in working class demands
\n(social security, welfare, etc) \u2013 can create openings that can give
\nbirth to even autonomous projects. But I would hesitate to claim that
\nthe financial crisis on Wall Street is a result of our expansion, of
\nthe expansion of the social movements.<\/p>\n
RN: In the news over the last few weeks we have seen the political
\nelite express its interests more openly. In recent history we have
\nseen horrible things happen when the interest of capital and the
\nruling class are threatened in a more direct manner. Do you see a move
\nin that direction?<\/p>\n
MH: As I mentioned, the US is no longer able to dictate global order.
\nThat does not mean that the situation is not a dangerous one. A
\nwounded elephant can still squash people.<\/p>\n
An important difference between Europe, and the US to some degree, in
\nthe thirties and today is that there is no present communist threat. I
\ndon’t see the rise of fascism as a prominent aspect of this crisis. I
\ndisagree with many of my friends who call the US fascist, which they
\ndo with reason: torture, Abu Ghraib, external wars to solve domestic
\nproblems… But for me, this accusation or fear is that it is an
\nabrogation of the rule of law and in some ways the rule of capitalism.
\nIt proposes a form of sovereignty that is in some sense outside the
\nsocial field, standing above it. In both political and theoretical
\ndiscussions in the recent years there has been an overemphasis on the
\ncategory of sovereignty in political analysis, on the extraordinary,
\non the state of exception, and therefore a lack of analysis of what to
\nme seems the central, but ordinary, levels of daily life: the
\nfunctioning of law, of capitalism. The focus on Guantanamo and Abu
\nGhraib takes the attention away form the real substance of the ruling
\npowers of today. If we were moving towards fascism, it would be
\nnoticeable on these levels, that capital and state power is
\ndysfunctional in everyday life. But their power seems to me quite solid.<\/p>\n
RN: Over the last years you and Negri have worked quite a lot with the
\n"metropole", a metaphor that situates the political thinking at the
\nheart of the empire, the mother city of the empire. Has the political
\nterrain of resistance changed from the periphery to the centre?<\/p>\n
MH: The metropole is a central theme in Common Wealth. The hypothesis
\nis that the metropole is to the multitude what the factory was to the
\nindustrial working class. The metaphor functions on different levels:<\/p>\n
1) As the site of production, in the sense that production is no
\nlonger isolated in the factory, but spread out across the city, in
\nsocial relations, etc.<\/p>\n
2) As the site of exploitation and expropriation, in the same way that
\nthe factory once was. For example, real-estate values are not
\ndetermined on what’s inside the house, but by the common that is
\nproduced by people in the city: a culturally diverse neighbourhood, or
\none with a lot of social tensions, or a really boring one. All of this
\nis a result of the production of the common, which is expropriated by
\nthe property value. A rundown and cheap neighbourhood attracts
\nstudents and artist, it becomes a cool place with cafes, galleries and
\nclubs, then the rich move in and the place turns really boring. It is
\nall about the expropriation of the common.<\/p>\n
3) It is, as you point out, the centre for hierarchies, as a
\n"metropolis" in both ancient Greek and French colonialist sense.<\/p>\n
4) And it is the site of antagonism, of revolt. Metropolitan revolt is
\na strike against capitalism, but also as a revolt against the form of
\nthe city itself. A direct example would be los piqueteros in Argentina
\nafter 2000. Unions of unemployed workers, who can’t strike at the
\nfactory because they don’t have a factory, and therefore choose to
\nstrike in the city, picket the streets blocking the roads. In the same
\nway that the industrial working class occupied the factories, they
\noccupy the city. A more complex example is the revolt in les banlieues
\nof Paris in 2005. Of course the youth in the suburbs revolted against
\nthe racial hierarchies, the new work laws, and precariousness in
\ngeneral, but this is concretized as a revolt against the city. What
\ndid they burn? Cars, modes of transport, schools \u2013 these are all
\nsymbols or loci the city has of the means of their exclusion and
\nsubmission.<\/p>\n
The analogy is useful. This does not mean that people in the
\ncountryside are stupid, but rather that there has been a
\n"metropolitanization" of the entire world. The divisions between the
\ncountryside and the city are not longer what they were.<\/p>\n
RN: But does this not only apply to the Western societies, the city as
\na city for production and rebellion, as a result of the exportation of
\nthe industrial working class to, for example, Southeast Asia?<\/p>\n
MH: In Southeast Asia, at least the countries I know, there are
\nInternet cafes on every street corner, fare more than in Europe or the
\nUS. There is of course a metropolitanization of the countryside in
\nterms of control, but there is also a metropolitanization of the world
\nin terms of communication. I’m here thinking in analogy to what Marx
\nsays in the "Brumaire", when he criticizes the French peasantry in the
\n1850s for being stupid, for not being able to represent themselves:
\nthey were isolated and lacked the possibility to communicate with each
\nother, they lacked information. The workers on the other hand
\ncommunicated every day in the factory. It is this division that no
\nlonger exists.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
5980-interview-with-michael-hardt<\/p>\n
6717<\/p>\n
EmiNews 2008<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"