Empire (11 page)

with the political agitation ofthe First International, continuing in

the 1880s and 1890s with the formation of socialist political and

trade union organizations, and then rising to a peak after the Russian

revolution of1905 and the first international cycle ofanti-imperialist

struggles.11 A second wave arose after the Soviet revolution of 1917,

which was followed by an international progression of struggles

that could only be contained by fascisms on one side and reabsorbed

by the New Deal and antifascist fronts on the other. And finally there

was the wave ofstruggles that began with the Chinese revolution

and proceeded through the African and Latin American liberation

struggles to the explosions ofthe 1960s throughout the world.

These international cycles ofstruggles were the real motor

that drove the development ofthe institutions ofcapital and that

drove it in a process ofref

orm and restructuring.12 Proletarian,

anticolonial, and anti-imperialist internationalism, the struggle for

communism, which lived in all the most powerful insurrectional

events ofthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anticipated and

prefigured the processes ofthe globalization ofcapital and the

formation of Empire. In this way the formation of Empire is a

response
to proletarian internationalism. There is nothing dialectical or teleological about this anticipation and prefiguration ofcapitalist

development by the mass struggles. On the contrary, the struggles

52

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

themselves are demonstrations ofthe creativity ofdesire, utopias

oflived experience, the workings ofhistoricity as potentiality—in

short, the struggles are the naked reality ofthe
res gestae.
A teleology of sorts is constructed only after the fact,
post festum.

The struggles that preceded and prefigured globalization were

expressions ofthe force ofliving labor, which sought to liberate

itselffrom the rigid territorializing regimes imposed on it. As it

contests the dead labor accumulated against it, living labor always

seeks to break the fixed territorializing structures, the national orga-

nizations, and the political figures that keep it prisoner. With the

force of living labor, its restless activity, and its deterritorializing

desire, this process ofrupture throws open all the windows of

history. When one adopts the perspective ofthe activity ofthe

multitude, its production ofsubjectivity and desire, one can recog-

nize how globalization, insofar as it operates a real deterritorialization

ofthe previous structures ofexploitation and control, is really a

condition ofthe liberation ofthe multitude. But how can this

potential for liberation be realized today? Does that same uncontain-

able desire for freedom that broke and buried the nation-state and

that determined the transition toward Empire still live beneath

the ashes ofthe present, the ashes ofthe fire that consumed the

internationalist proletarian subject that was centered on the industrial

working class? What has come to stand in the place ofthat subject?

In what sense can we say that the ontological rooting ofa new

multitude has come to be a positive or alternative actor in the

articulation ofglobalization?

TheMoleand theSnake

We need to recognize that the very subject oflabor and revolt

has changed profoundly. The composition of the proletariat has

transformed and thus our understanding of it must too. In conceptual

terms we understand
proletariat
as a broad category that includes all those whose labor is directly or indirectly exploited by and subjected

to capitalist norms ofproduction and reproduction.13 In a previous

era the category ofthe proletariat centered on and was at times

A L T E R N A T I V E S W I T H I N E M P I R E

53

effectively subsumed under the
industrial working class,
whose paradigmatic figure was the male mass factory worker. That industrial

working class was often accorded the leading role over other figures

oflabor (such as peasant labor and reproductive labor) in both

economic analyses and political movements. Today that working

class has all but disappeared from view. It has not ceased to exist,

but it has been displaced from its privileged position in the capitalist

economy and its hegemonic position in the class composition of

the proletariat. The proletariat is not what it used to be, but that

does not mean it has vanished. It means, rather, that we are faced

once again with the analytical task ofunderstanding the new compo-

sition ofthe proletariat as a class.

The fact that under the category of proletariat we understand

all
those exploited by and subject to capitalist domination should not indicate that the proletariat is a homogeneous or undifferentiated

unit. It is indeed cut through in various directions by differences

and stratifications. Some labor is waged, some is not; some labor

is restricted to within the factory walls, some is dispersed across the

unbounded social terrain; some labor is limited to eight hours a

day and forty hours a week, some expands to fill the entire time

oflife; some labor is accorded a minimal value, some is exalted to

the pinnacle ofthe capitalist economy. We will argue (in Section

3.4) that among the various figures ofproduction active today,

the figure ofimmaterial labor power (involved in communication,

cooperation, and the production and reproduction of affects) occu-

pies an increasingly central position in both the schema ofcapitalist

production and the composition ofthe proletariat. Our point here

is that all ofthese diverse forms oflabor are in some way subject

to capitalist discipline and capitalist relations ofproduction. This

fact of being within capital and sustaining capital is what defines

the proletariat as a class.

We need to look more concretely at the form of the struggles

in which this new proletariat expresses its desires and needs. In the

last half-century, and in particular in the two decades that stretched

from 1968 to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the restructuring and global

54

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

expansion ofcapitalist production have been accompanied by a

transformation ofproletarian struggles. As we said, the figure ofan

international cycle ofstruggles based on the communication and

translation ofthe common desires oflabor in revolt seems no longer

to exist. The fact that the cycle as the specific form of the assemblage

ofstruggles has vanished, however, does not simply open up to an

abyss. On the contrary, we can recognize powerful events on the

world scene that reveal the trace ofthe multitude’s refusal ofexploi-

tation and that signal a new kind ofproletarian solidarity and mili-

tancy.

Consider the most radical and powerful struggles of the final

years ofthe twentieth century: the Tiananmen Square events in

1989, the Intifada against Israeli state authority, the May 1992 revolt

in Los Angeles, the uprising in Chiapas that began in 1994, and

the series ofstrikes that paralyzed France in December 1995, and

those that crippled South Korea in 1996. Each ofthese struggles

was specific and based on immediate regional concerns in such a

way that they could in no respect be linked together as a globally

expanding chain ofrevolt. None ofthese events inspired a cycle

ofstruggles, because the desires and needs they expressed could not

be translated into different contexts. In other words, (potential)

revolutionaries in other parts ofthe world did not hear ofthe

events in Beijing, Nablus, Los Angeles, Chiapas, Paris, or Seoul

and immediately recognize them as their own struggles. Further-

more, these struggles not only fail to communicate to other contexts

but also lack even a local communication, and thus often have a

very briefduration where they are born, burning out in a flash. This

is certainly one ofthe central and most urgent political paradoxes of

our time: in our much celebrated age ofcommunication,
struggles

have become all but incommunicable.

This paradox ofincommunicability makes it extremely difficult

to grasp and express the new power posed by the struggles that

have emerged. We ought to be able to recognize that what the

struggles have lost in extension, duration, and communicability they

have gained in intensity. We ought to be able to recognize that

A L T E R N A T I V E S W I T H I N E M P I R E

55

although all ofthese struggles f

ocused on their own local and

immediate circumstances, they all nonetheless posed problems of

supranational relevance, problems that are proper to the new figure

ofimperial capitalist regulation. In Los Angeles, for example, the

riots were fueled by local racial antagonisms and patterns of social

and economic exclusion that are in many respects particular to

that (post-)urban territory, but the events were also immediately

catapulted to a general level insofar as they expressed a refusal of

the post-Fordist regime ofsocial control. Like the Intifada in certain

respects, the Los Angeles riots demonstrated how the decline of

Fordist bargaining regimes and mechanisms ofsocial mediation has

made the management ofracially and socially diverse metropolitan

territories and populations so precarious. The looting ofcommodi-

ties and burning ofproperty were not just metaphors but the real

global condition ofthe mobility and volatility ofpost-Fordist social

mediations.14 In Chiapas, too, the insurrection focused primarily

on local concerns: problems ofexclusion and lack ofrepresentation

specific to Mexican society and the Mexican state, which have also

to a limited degree long been common to the racial hierarchies

throughout much ofLatin American. The Zapatista rebellion, how-

ever, was also immediately a struggle against the social regime

imposed by NAFTA and more generally the systematic exclusion

and subordination in the regional construction ofthe world mar-

ket.15 Finally, like those in Seoul, the massive strikes in Paris and

throughout France in late 1995 were aimed at specific local and

national labor issues (such as pensions, wages, and unemployment),

but the struggle was also immediately recognized as a clear contesta-

tion ofthe new social and economic construction ofEurope. The

French strikes called above all for a new notion of the public, a

new construction ofpublic space against the neoliberal mechanisms

ofprivatization that accompany more or less everywhere the project

ofcapitalist globalization.16 Perhaps precisely because all these strug-

gles are incommunicable and thus blocked from traveling horizon-

tally in the form of a cycle, they are forced instead to leap vertically

and touch immediately on the global level.

56

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

We ought to be able to recognize that this is not the appearance

ofa new cycle ofinternationalist struggles, but rather the emergence

ofa new quality ofsocial movements. We ought to be able to

recognize, in other words, the fundamentally new characteristics

these struggles all present, despite their radical diversity. First, each

struggle, though firmly rooted in local conditions, leaps immediately

to the global level and attacks the imperial constitution in its general-

ity. Second, all the struggles destroy the traditional distinction be-

tween economic and political struggles. The struggles are at once

economic, political, and cultural—and hence they are biopolitical

struggles, struggles over the form of life. They are constituent strug-

gles, creating new public spaces and new forms of community.

We ought to be able to recognize all this, but it is not that

easy. We must admit, in fact, that even when trying to individuate

the real novelty ofthese situations, we are hampered by the nagging

impression that these struggles are always already old, outdated, and

anachronistic. The struggles at Tiananmen Square spoke a language

ofdemocracy that seemed long out offashion; the guitars, head-

bands, tents, and slogans all looked like a weak echo ofBerkeley

in the 1960s. The Los Angeles riots, too, seemed like an aftershock

ofthe earthquake ofracial conflicts that shook the United States

in the 1960s. The strikes in Paris and Seoul seemed to take us back

to the era ofthe mass factory worker, as ifthey were the last gasp

ofa dying working class. All these struggles, which pose really

new elements, appear from the beginning to be already old and

outdated—precisely because they cannot communicate, because

their languages cannot be translated. The struggles do not communi-

cate despite their being hypermediatized, on television, the Internet,

and every other imaginable medium. Once again we are confronted

by the paradox ofincommunicability.

We can certainly recognize real obstacles that block the com-