RE: AUT: excerpt from interview with Negri

[".: s0metim3s :." <s0metim3s@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris H:

: Negri's analysis here seems
: superficial.  Lets end the war and lets
: build continental organizations and
: lets build a New Deal.  This argument
: seems hopelessly liberal, failing to
: acknowledge power struggles within the
: movement and the cooptation of struggle
: by those who have consolidated power
: through trade unions and NGOs, ...

I don't think Negri is ignorant of those conflicts
within (or between) particular groupings and
networks.  I do think, as the excerpt from this
interview (and other articles) makes clear what
was implicit in _Empire_, he has been actively (if
obliquely) supporting the processes of
'co-optation.'  I think there are those who would
prefer his politics to be better than this; but
they're not.

I'm not sure how useful 'co-option' is in
analysing the relationship and conflicts between
institutional parts of the Left and the more
fluid, diverse movements.  I happen to like
Negri's (or rather Walter Benjamin's) distinction
between constitutive and constituted, extended
beyond Benjamin's reference to violence to include
force, suasion, corporeality, and so on.  In these
terms, Negri has been quite clear to argue *for*
the utility of constituent to constitution, that
the purpose of the constitutive power of the
multitude is to bring on that new New Deal. He
says so explicitly in the 'Roads ...' piece on
globalproject which I can't seem to find again.

It doesn't require a libertarian disposition to
insist that subordinating the constitutive power
to constitution isn't just superficial, it's
strategically daft.

Assuming for the moment that I do support the
particular content of this new New Deal -- which I
don't --, it makes no strategic sense to confine
the 'movements' to the expression of such an aim.
Doing so will only produce more of the same
current morbidity: the development of 'demands' by
conferences in/and the absence of protests or
struggles.  Given that, the turbulence required to
frighten/persuade capital/state into granting
particular reforms will not exist.  So, seems to
me that the 'co-option' of the 'movements' by the
institutional Left will not produce the new New
Deal the latter imagine would be a grand step
forward.  The institutional Left need the fluid,
antagonistic tubulence of the 'movements' much
more than the latter need the former.

Angela
_______________

<end message>




     --- from list aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---