Empire by Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

Author:Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri [Hardt, Michael & Negri, Toni]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

3.3 - RESISTANCE, CRISIS, TRANSFORMATION

The continuity of struggle is easy: the workers need only themselves and the boss in front of them. But the continuity of organization is a rare and complex thing: as soon as it is institutionalized it quickly becomes used by capitalism, or by the workers’ movement in the service of capitalism.

Mario Tronti

The New Left sprang … from Elvis’s gyrating pelvis.

Jerry Rubin

Earlier we posed the Vietnam War as a deviation from the U.S. constitutional project and its tendency toward Empire. The war was also, however, an expression of the desire for freedom of the Vietnamese, an expression of peasant and proletarian subjectivity -a fundamental example of resistance against both the final forms of imperialism and the international disciplinary regime. The Vietnam War represents a real turning point in the history of contemporary capitalism insofar as the Vietnamese resistance is conceived as the symbolic center of a whole series of struggles around the world that had up until that point remained separate and distant from one another. The peasantry who were being subsumed under multinational capital, the (post)colonial proletariat, the industrial working class in the dominant capitalist countries, and the new strata of intellectual proletariat everywhere all tended toward a common site of exploitation in the factorysociety of the globalized disciplinary regime. The various struggles converged against one common enemy: the international disciplinary order. An objective unity was established, sometimes with the consciousness of those in struggle and sometimes without.

The long cycle of struggles against the disciplinary regimes had reached maturity and forced capital to modify its own structures and undergo a paradigm shift.

Two, Three, Many Vietnams

In the late 1960s the international system of capitalist production was in crisis.[1] Capitalist crisis, as Marx tells us, is a situation that requires capital to undergo a general devaluation and a profound rearrangement of the relations of production as a result of the downward pressure that the proletariat puts on the rate of profit. In other words, capitalist crisis is not simply a function of capital’s own dynamics but is caused directly by proletarian conflict.[2] This Marxian notion of crisis helps bring to light the most important features of the crisis of the late 1960s. The fall of the rate of profit and the disruption of relations of command in this period are best understood when seen as a result of the confluence and accumulation of proletarian and anticapitalist attacks against the international capitalist system.

In the dominant capitalist countries, this period witnessed a worker attack of the highest intensity directed primarily against the disciplinary regimes of capitalist labor. The attack was expressed, first of all, as a general refusal of work and specifically as a refusal of factory work. It was aimed against productivity and against any model of development based on increasing the productivity of factory labor. The refusal of the disciplinary regime and the affirmation of the sphere of non-work became the defining features of a new set of collective practices and a new form of life.[3] Second, the attack served to subvert the capitalist divisions of the labor market.

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