<nettime> Re: Zagreb interview with Michael Hardt

[Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>]

"One could imagine pushing social cooperation further, beyond the 
bounds which capital can tolerate," says Michael Hardt drily, in his 
interview with Ognjen Strpic in Zagreb.

What Michael Hardt calls "communism" lies essentially in this social 
cooperation. And he's right, in the sense that the empirical beacon 
of a pragmatic revolutionary politics is founded on phenomena of free 
cooperation, right now, in fact, before our nose - or with our 
concourse, in the best of cases.

Hardt is less dry, or even enchanted, when it comes to the multitude:
"Our attempt with this concept of the multitude is to recognize the 
possibility of a different kind of political organizing. Rather than 
been based on, say, the alternative between identity and difference, 
it's based on continuity between multiplicity and commonality.... 
groups that we have thought in a previous way were objectively 
antagonistic, even contradictory to each other, say, trade unions and 
environmentalists, suddenly, starting in Seattle, function 
together..."

I would like to submit that this sudden cooperation - which has also 
been short-lived, in the case of US trade unions and 
environmentalists - results from the perception of EXTREME WEAKNESS 
ON THE SIDE OF ALL SOLIDARITY-BASED MOVEMENTS. In particular and 
exceptional circumstances, desperation suddenly breaks the barriers 
that our societies are so devilishly good at erecting between 
interest groups and even between individuals.

The political question is then: HOW TO GO BEYOND THE SUDDEN 
INSPIRATIONS OF DESPERATION?

Here lies the weakness of all the rhetorics based on an invocation of 
absolute democracy:

"The other way in which [Empire] is a communist book is that is 
argues for an  absolute democracy, for democracy founded on relations 
of equality,  freedom, and social solidarity. I mean, I think that 
those three code  words belong to the French Republican tradition, 
but also belong, in my  mind, to the best elements of the communist 
tradition. So, that also seems  to me that it's the way it's a 
communist book, but it's demanding an  absolute democracy."

The historical fact is that is that democracy, as we know it, 
contains an absolute contradiction. Social solidarity - 
i.e."fraternity" - was added to the French republican slogan in 1848, 
when the "National Workshops" were instituted to give work, and 
therefore sustenance, to the masses of unemployed urban-dwellers left 
without any resources by a classic capitalist recession (the one 
based on the railroad bubble, which so many have compared to the 
internet bubble, by the way). What people realized during the 
revolution of 1848 was that there was no substantial equality, and 
therefore no effective liberty, for people enslaved to the liberty of 
others (the bosses). But who had the power to create the National 
Workshops? An organ of redistribution: the state.

The alternative globalization that Hardt calls for (me too) involves 
a rethinking and a reinstitution of the state, or at least of 
solidarity.

This raises screams from the rank and file of the autonomists. But I 
say: you really are the "rank and file" so long as you continue to 
believe that the enthusiasm of global cooperation gets rid of any 
need to think about how global redistribution will be carried out. In 
fact this rhetoric is coming from people who know better. Whoever 
calls themselves "communist" has some idea about effective equality, 
and what it entails: the socialization of education, access to tools, 
and protection in the case of life-accidents, at the very least. 
Abundance for all as a feasible utopia. How to create those 
conditions, starting not from "human nature" but from actual 
conditions, is the political question. "How things get managed, 
that's the interesting thing," said Toni Negri in one of his 
interviews on the pre-revolutionary situation in Argentina.

In his review of the book, Zizeck said that Empire was 
"pre-political." His argument was that the call for global 
citizenship would immediately provoke a fascist reaction in Europe, 
and was therefore unrealistic. Look around you today. I'm for the 
abolition of all borders. But that ALSO means a total reappropriation 
of the European state, and then of the American one, to make it not 
just into a universal welfare state mending the lacerations of 
capitalism, but much more: it means inventing procedures of 
delegation and representation capable of directing the tremendous 
wealth of modern technology toward the largest number of people, 
without creating a new version of bureaucratic oppression. Again, the 
political question. Not so easy.

Let's not kid ourselves. This can only be achieved when we all have 
first faced a situation of DESPERATION. Solidarity doesn't grow on 
trees. And unfortunately, DESPERATION is coming. The shit is going to 
hit the fan, and the question of political violence is not going to 
be limited to breaking the windows of Starbucks, or to the way the 
media can distort such acts. Perhaps when the Palestinians are 
DESPERATE enough, they will adopt Ghandian non-violence, when faced 
with the ABSOLUTE OPPRESSION of modern military technology. Perhaps 
we will move toward GENERAL STRIKES in European and American cities, 
total stoppages of every function, whenever our outdated "leaders" 
show their heads. But for that, we have to look around and see that 
people are literally starving, next door, that lives are falling 
apart in our lovely European and American cities, for lack of an 
address to the political question.

The NEOFASCISM gathering all around us is only the symptom of society 
falling apart under the pressures, the anti-state or anti-society 
pressures, of NEOLIBERALISM. But the worst is, you have to face both 
the symptom and the cause.

In solidarity with Michael Hardt, Ognjen Strpic and all those who are 
trying to THINK POLITICS today.

Brian Holmes

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