Re: AUT: RE: antiwar movement

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*Title* 	   	Toni Negri, "Speech at the European Social Forum, Paris,
November 2003"
*Date* 	   	Wednesday March 24, @04:32AM
*Author* 	   	jim
*Topic* 	   	Rants <http://info.interactivist.net/search.pl?topic=16>
from the /from-the-archives/ dept.

http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/03/24/1439215

*"Speech at the European Social Forum, Paris, November 2003"
Toni Negri*

    [On Thursday 20 November 2003 the Global Radio-Padova website
    published the text of Toni Negri's speech at the European Social
    Forum in Paris. The original Italian text can be found on their
    website at Global <http://www.globalmagazine.org>. Translated by Ed
    Emery.]

"I am Italian, so I shall speak in Italian -- particularly because I too
would like to begin by remembering with sympathy and with much emotion
the Italians who have died in Iraq in recent days. Italians have not
been used to having war-dead, not since fascism sent many of our friends
and relations into the monstrous adventures of the Second World War. The
last thing we needed was for a democratic regime to overturn the very
terms of the Italian constitution by sending poor wretches to die in a
war which the vast majority of Italians do not understand the reasons
for, and which they oppose.

As our parents' generation said, expressing their anti-fascism: damn
those who sent our brothers to war during the world war, so we too say
damn those who sent these men to die in Iraq today: damn them, damn
them, damn them.

It should be said that all this has brought about a further terrible
split between the peace movement and all those in Italy who have
supported this war. Among the latter I include a sizeable proportion of
the Left, because just as we must never forget that a section of the
Italian Left fully supported the war in Kosovo, so too we cannot forget
that a large part of the Italian Left was willing to vote (after a
period of laborious abstention) for the renewed posting of Italian
troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These are things which we cannot forget, and it is only on the basis of
this non-forgetting that we can reconstruct a Left in Italy -- and I say
"reconstruct a Left" because I think that the problem of global war is
not simply the problem of struggling against this war, and struggling
against all the imperialist and neo-colonial leftovers that are going
around in the world; it also means arriving at an understanding of what
is a new moment in the general political behaviours of capital in the
world of globalisation.

War as it is presented to us today is not simply an attempt by certain
US elites to get their hands on oil (although it is certainly also
that); war is not simpy an operation of intervening in the situation in
the Middle East in order to make possible further political operations
(although it is certainly also that). War as it has been invented,
applied and developed today is a constituent war. A "constituent war"
means that the form of war is no longer simply the legitimation of
power. War becomes the external and internal form through which all the
operations of power, the organisation of power at the global level, are
being developed.

War is something which has to do with all the action of power, of
worldwide power, of global power, and this is the form in which we have
to fight against this war.

We must oppose this war, understanding that within it, within its very
form, it is a constituent war, a biopolitical war which affects the
entirety of the ordering of life, of the production and reproduction of
life. This war is a war which saw itself as a policing war, which sought
to transform the intervention of the US armed forces into a ductile,
flexible capacity for intervening easily and quickly in all parts of the
world.

It was a war which sought to present itself as no longer a war between
states and other states, but a war against a public enemy, a war against
an internal reality which progressively came to be defined as dangerous.
In short, a war which involved the social relation in the fullest sense
of the term.

What Ignacio Ramonet was saying at the start [of this meeting] about,
precisely, the superimposition of economic war, social war and military
war is perfectly correct. These are things which form a whole, and they
form a whole because there is a constituent organisational project
running through this mode of making war. This is no longer the old
imperialist war which sets out to expand the powers of single nations;
rather it is a war in the name of global capital. It is a war that moves
as global organisation, and this is what we need to understand today.
I'm thinking of what we have in Italy, with evocations of patriotism, of
the nation, of what are supposed to be the great traditional values of
Italian culture. These values are no longer our values -- these values
of patriotism and the nation were never values for the true communist
tradition, nor are they today, and neither will they be in the future,
ever.

We are truly and fundamentally internationalists, but we can only be
internationalist to the extent that, and when, we understand that today
we have this empire in the process of formation, and that it is against
its military power -- as well as its economic, ideological and political
power -- that we have to fight.

We must fight against this fundamental unity [of factors], and obviously
this is the next transition that we have to make.

What does it mean, to make this transition? It means that against this
war -- which is foundational, and constitutive -- we must oppose
political positions, we must oppose actions, and it is clear that peace
as a value is not a "take it or leave it" thing.

Peace has become a value which is absolutely fundamental in the entirety
of our actions: our active disobedience is a disobedience which wants to
pose itself truly in terms of peace, a disobedience which is active and
if possible non-violent: I say "if possible non-violent" because in our
struggle for democracy we cannot re-enact the totalitarian, violent
character of capitalist power.

We really do have to break the homology of a struggle for power which
re-enacts the characteristics of power; we absolutely must move by
reconquering the terms of peace as a foundational and constitutive
element in itself: herein is a truly alternative constitution of our
perspective.

Naturally we know perfectly well that if it had not been for the plagues
in Egypt Moses would never have been able to make the exodus from the
country where his people had been kept in slavery. We know perfectly
well that if it had not been for the Aaron's rearguard they probably
would not have succeeded in opening up the Red Sea. Therefore we know
that it is necessary to resist, and that our resistance is not always
"nice". But we also know that our strength and our capacity for
aggregating, for pulling things together, is achieved first and foremost
via an active and non-violent disobedience, and this really must be an
element that we take upon ourselves. And I believe that when we launch,
from this impressive meeting, a continuing battle against the occupation
by the capitalists in Iraq, against everything that has happened, and
against war in general, we must be sure to keep this form present.

If it is true that capitalist development today uses war in order to
organise the world -- and thus to hierarchise it, operate selection in
it, and practise inclusion/exclusion, as it is attempting to do -- then
we must obviously transform our struggle for peace into a social
struggle: it is not possible to separate the struggle for peace from the
social struggle, and that brings us back to the basic problem, which is
that of how to reconstruct a Left, a Left which is capable of being
pacifist, but which at the same time knows how to put forward elements
"in common" -- putting forward the big values that really are
reconstructive of a democratic society in which democracy is not a
democracy of the few, but a democracy of all, and for all.

So, in my opinion these are the feelings and -- in the view of many
comrades in Italy -- also the guiding lines of our action and our thinking.

Thank you.

Links
------------------------------------------------------------------------

   1. "Global" - http://www.globalmagazine.org/

--
http://www.auskadi.tk/
"the riddle which man must solve, he can only solve in being, in
being what he is and not something else...."



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