[AUT] Hardt interview

["Nate Holdren" <nateholdren@xxxxxxxxx>]

hi all,

Below is an interview I did with Michael Hardt by phone in October
2006. It was slated to appear in an issue of Greenpepper Magazine. I
haven't been able to reach folk from Greenpepper for a while and I
don't know if that issue came out. I'd like the piece to be read
rather than sit on my hard drive, so I decided to circulate it by
email. Please feel free to circulate it and so on.

Many of the questions were the result of ongoing discussions with
friends and comrades on the aut-op-sy email list and elsewhere. Some
of us were part of an earlier interview with Hardt conducted by email.
Because the questions come from ongoing discussions some of which were
a year or more in length, and because the interview was done about a
year and a half ago, I don't remember exactly who all shaped the
questions or otherwise had a hand in this. Among those I can name for
sure are Angela Mitropolous, Thiago Oppermann, and Gavin from
Greenpepper.

*

Q: Could you start by giving a short introduction to the idea of the
'multitude' for those who may not be familiar with it?

Hardt: I like phrasing things in formulas, so the formula is that
multitude equals singularity plus cooperation - or autonomy plus
association. This is, of course, recalling Lenin's slogan that
'communism equals soviets plus electrification'.

For us, the issue of multitude is to think about a form of political
organisation and of social life that is based on a relation of
differences - one that doesn't preclude differences, doesn't preclude
cooperation and association. You might think of older US political
slogans, I think it was Audre Lord, 'our differences are our
strength'. Or there's another: 'we don't want a world without sexual
difference, we want one where sexual difference doesn't matter'. I've
given various definitions, sometimes economic, philosophical. This is
a political one.

Q: There's an argument in your recent work with Negri that democracy
is an unfinished project and that the destiny of the 'multitude' is to
materialise 'real' and absolute democracy by discarding the current
'inauthentic' application of the concept. Isn't this democratic thesis
a way of asking for more adequate and inclusive representation, rather
than opening spaces to explore ways of moving beyond representation
itself? Is there a way in which the teleological project of realising
'true' democracy and authentically applying it as a principle might
stifle more open-ended experimentation of other non-representational
political forms or ways of coming together?

Hardt: I can understand how you might want to abandon the concept of
democracy. I mean, George Bush gets on television and talks about
going to war to protect and restore democracy. So I can see how you
might want to say let's not use that word anymore. On the other hand,
it's possible to fight over what the concept means. Not to return to a
previously existing meaning but to think about a possible meaning. We
can fight to make it mean something other than the forms of
representative democracy we have today. That is, to say no, that's not
the case, that's not what Bush is doing, that's not democracy in the
sense that we mean it.

Q: Are you saying you'd want to break the link between representation
and democracy?

Hardt: Yes, I'd want to break that link conceptually but also through
historical investigation into how the word has been used at different
times -- both before the link between democracy and representation was
historically constructed and in experiments in practice today.

I don't think that democracy or absolute democracy has to be
understood as stifling. I think it can be a term for the activities
you're talking about, the activities that you are worried might get
stifled. I'd also like to say that I don't think the one precludes the
other -- we can insist that representative institutions today live up
to their claim, engage in some way with the structures of
representative forms of democracy, while also trying out forms of
non-representative democracy as well.

Q: In Grammar of the Multitude Paolo Virno talks about Marx's
descriptions of the working class on the US frontier, saying that we
can see there an instantiation of the working class in the form of the
multitude. But the idea of the 'not yet multitude' that you and Negri
propose implies that this type of instantiation has never yet
occurred. Can you expand on the some of the differences between your
work and Paolo Virno's in this respect?

Hardt: I don't think that Toni and I actually disagree with Paolo. In
his introduction to Grammar of the Multitude Sylvère Lotringer might
be trying to say that we do, but I don't think we do. We do use the
term -- and by 'we' I don't just mean Toni and I because there are a
lot of us using the idea of multitude -- and we sometimes use it in
self-contradictory ways. I don't think self-contradiction is always a
bad thing, as long as it's productive. We often use the term in
different ways to read political possibilities in the past - like when
Paolo talks about Marx talking about the U.S. frontier in the texts on
primitive accumulation. In a way, we can say that multitude has
existed before, but in another way. Another way to use the word is as
a project that hasn't yet been done, but one that could be done.
That's what we mean by the 'not yet multitude'. We can read history
and earlier struggles as precedents and for inspiration but not for
repetition. We don't want to just do what was done before or to return
to an earlier point in time.

In the 1990s, for example, Paolo had this idea to reformulate the
International Workers of the World (IWW) based on immaterial labour,
calling it the 'Immaterial Workers of the World'. This wasn't really a
matter of repeating what the IWW did. It involved drawing on that
experience, drawing inspiration from its heterogeneity in terms of
languages, its mobility, its transversal nature. The reason I insist
on the 'not yet' is to insist that the multitude is not immediate.
It's an organisational project. You can think about it this way --
which was a commonplace of 1970s feminism -- that just because someone
is a woman doesn't mean she is automatically a feminist. You have to
become a feminist - it's a project. I insist on this because sometimes
people will want to say that just any group of people, any crowd, is
the multitude. The multitude is a project that takes organisation to
come about. And I think there's a way that Toni and - and I think
Paolo - would agree that this project is more ever possible now.

What is different about Paolo's work, though, is his focus on language
-- his use of linguistic approaches to analyse and understand
production today and its potentialities - which is really great, very
important and something that Toni and I steal from him. On this note,
I want to say that I love the collective development of concepts like
'multitude'. It's something I enjoy very much and it's a way to really
develop ideas, by working on them together. It's not like they belong
to anyone, and this type of collaboration can be very productive.

Q: You say that the project of the multitude is 'ever more possible
now'? Surely the capacity to organise ourselves autonomously -- that
is, the capacity for singularity plus cooperation -- doesn't just
begin to exist in post-fordism as is implied in both your work and
Virno's?

Hardt: Okay, think about Paolo again. Virno reads Hannah Arendt when
she says, in The Human Condition, that there's a difference between
politics and economics. Economic life is instrumental and political
life is speaking in the presence of others. Paolo takes this idea and
says it applies to production in the factory -- the factory is not a
place of speaking in the presence of others. You might disagree with
us and with Paolo and say though that there is still speaking going on
in the factory?

Q: Yes, and that the factory was always connected to the home and the
community and other loquacious spaces as well.

Hardt: That's right but today, production (the factory itself) is more
loquacious. There's an increased proximity between the political and
the economic. The talents needed at work are the talents used in
politics. Frederic Jameson talks about the de-differentiation of
fields in the era of globalisation. Virno, Toni and I are saying
something similar - though in a different and very specific case -
that there's a de-differentiation between work and politics happening
today under the present form of capitalism. This means there's an
increased capacity for democracy, for politics. Of course, this claim
has to be verified.

Q: When you talk about the capacity for multitude, for democracy, do
you mean that we are able to perform labour because we have the
capacity for the good life? Or do you mean that we have a capacity for
the good life because we work? In other words, do our capacities for
singularity plus cooperation derive from the fact that we perform
immaterial labour, or do we have to pass through labour in order to
arrive at the multitude?

Hardt: That's an important question, the question of where our
capacities come from, and I think the answer has to be that it's both.
This is an aside, but I used to be really into reading management
literature. This issue is something that management and management
trainers are thinking a lot about - where do skills come from?

Take, for example, McDonald's. McDonald's has this training school
they send their managers to - I think they call it 'McDonald's
University' or something like that. There's this interview with one of
the manager trainers where he is asked how the workers get the skills
that they need. In response, the trainer says that the workers get the
skills from their parents in the family - they get the skills they
need to work at McDonald's when their parents raise them and teach
them to be 'people persons'.

Q: This gets at a thread that runs through a lot of the questions we
have about your work -- the issue of unwaged reproductive labour,
labour that is ostensibly off the clock, but is still bound up with
value production. There's a section of volume one of Capital where
Marx quotes some English thinker who says "the English working class
are phenomenally productive today, and it's because they have leisure
time";, which makes this point. So when you and Negri talk about
general intellect entering into production, does general intellect
enter from the space of the home and from reproduction?

Hardt: In a way, yes, that's right. There's unwaged labour before
post-fordism and you could see some capacities present there in
earlier times. But like with multitude, it's not a spontaneous or
immediate thing. It's important to recognise that people have these
capacities, to look at what specific capacities there are today, to
see how they're used in labour and how they could be used differently.
And then there's the matter of actually using them differently. We
have to figure that part out and it's also a matter of organisation in
order to be able do to that.

Q: In response to a similar question on unwaged reproductive labour in
an earlier interview you did for the aut-op-sy mailing list, you
mentioned Deleuze and Guattari and their idea of desiring-production
as a way of opening up the idea of production. Can you say more about
this, particularly about different types of production? For example,
there's desiring production and there's value production and they're
not always the same all the time?

Hardt: It's important to note that for Deleuze and Guattari desiring
production is often co-opted. They understand that it enters into
value production at least some of the time and that it's not always
external. I think this is important because sometimes Deleuze and
Guattari can be taken as being too optimistic. But they do recognize
that desire has a relationship with value production. We also could
look at these as perspectives, different perspectives from which to
view things and to see what we can better understand from one
perspective or the others.


Q: What is at stake here is the question of practical rupture and of
having the theoretical space to think rupture. It's like Tronti's
point that the working class acts in certain ways that are disruptive
of capitalism but then these behaviours get capitalised. Doesn't
arguing that 'all life time is productive' make it hard to think about
activity that doesn't -- or at least some day, some activity that
won't -- get capitalised?

Hardt: That's an important question. First, though, I think it's
important to note that one doesn't preclude the other. Capitalisation
of activities isn't solely a bad thing. If workers demands are met by
capital and capital is forced to change that means that the working
class gets more powerful and new spaces and possibilities open up. At
least that's what I think Tronti meant back in the 1960s.

For example, I did an interview at the last World Social Forum in
Porto Alegre with a Brazilian journalist who asked "the World Economic
Forum said that their agenda is to alleviate poverty, isn't that a
problem?" And I said, "Why is that a problem?" It took a while to
figure out what the point was, but finally he said, "they stole your
ideas, they stole your agenda!" I told him, "that means we won." Being
able to dictate your enemy's agenda is a strength and a sign of power.

The question of rupture is another is another really important
organisational question. In some ways it's a matter of figuring out
what the forms of sabotage are today that we can use to turn the
capacities that we take to work and that are learned at work and use
them another way. I wish I had a good example of this, though and that
it was a simple as jamming a wooden shoe into a machine!

Q: You and Negri reference Lenin approvingly in your recent work. You
have stated that if Lenin were here today he would organise in network
form -- and, presumably, concur with the arguments presented in Empire
and Multitude. Could you clarify what you find relevant in Lenin's
work and in the history that he is bound up with? Inversely, if you
and Negri were around in Lenin's time, would you have agreed with
Lenin?

Hardt: In his book on Lenin, Toni says (if I remember correctly) that
Lenin's theory of the party is not a theory of the Bolshevik party.
It's a theory of organisation and the idea is that the dominant form
of labour will provide the most powerful form of organisation to
oppose capital. The form of organisation has tended to correlate to
the dominant form of labour -- there's a boss in the factory, there's
a boss in the party or the union -- and these forms of organisation
are the ones that are most effective for moving forward workers
demands. It's basically a functionalist argument.

This is what I think about with regard to the differences we have with
Slavoj Zizek. In some ways I'm not sure if Slavoj is saying 'we need a
party' in the former sense or the latter sense. I'd like to think he
means the latter sense - that is, that we need a form of political
organisation adequate to the contemporary field of labour and its
capacities, not that we need to repeat the organisational structure of
the Bolsheviks. On the other hand, as for the issue of what I would do
if I was in Lenin's time, I don't really know. I don't know how to
answer that. I don't know if what I think looking back is the same
thing I would think if I had actually been there.

Q: Could you talk more about what you refer to as the 'dominant form
of labour'? There are, for example, dominant forms of value that are
important in the total circuits of production and there's also
dominance internal to the working class (or labour aristocracies). You
seem to be saying that the most effective and the most desirable form
of organisation are not always the same thing. Or that what are taken
to be most effective don't actually have efficacy in addressing
important questions, and this is a problem for communism.

Hardt: Efficacy is really important, but in a way this is what Toni
and I are saying about production today and the possibilities that are
present. The model in production relations today is more desirable
compared with those in prior times. The gap between desirability and
efficacy is narrowing.

What we are referring to is not what segment of the proletariat is in
a most privileged position or has political dominance; we are asking
rather what type of labour is having its qualities extended across to
other areas of labour and over society as a whole. At one point,
industrial labour's qualities were progressively imposed on all other
forms of production and across society itself -- its mechanisation,
its temporality, its working day, its family structure, its rhythms.
Toni and I argue that this is what is happening with immaterial labour
today. Of course there are big differences in how some people get
compensated for this, and there are gendered divisions of labour,
racial divisions of labour, geographical divisions. Affective labour,
for example, is largely feminine and poorly compensated -- and in that
sense it's in no way a labour aristocracy - but its qualities are
being spread to other areas and that's where the gap between
desirability and efficacy is narrowing.

Q: But there doesn't seem to be much of a difference between unwaged
reproductive labour in earlier times and the unwaged reproductive
labour done today. For instance, a housewife today does things similar
to a housewife in the 1900s (albeit in different ways) -- they are
both bound up with value production. Why do you see the possibility
for a new form of organisation based on the qualities of this type of
labour?

Hardt: Because now those traits are being spread throughout various
forms of labour. In many ways, this is the point of looking at labour
and at class composition - in order to see what people are capable of.
We don't want to just assert people's capabilities. We don't want to
just assume that everyone is born able to form autonomous networks. We
have to see what capacities people have and how to verify them.

I can see that the very fact of social existence means that some of
these capacities must already exist. But I'm not sure that the
capacity to love a child, for example, is the same as (or enough for)
a capacity to organise and run society. And even then, doesn't love
itself have to be learned? It seems to me that if we simply assume
human capacities -- for love, for democracy, for self-organisation --
as immediate and natural we fail to recognise the necessary
organisational processes.


Q: Your writing on biopolitics seems to overlap with - yet in
important ways differ from -- Giorgio Agamben's ideas on sovereign
power and naked life. Q: In Multitude you and Negri criticise Agamben
and elsewhere forcefully argue against 'confus(ing) the flesh with any
notion of naked life'. How would you characterise Agamben's view of
biopolitics, particularly in relation to your own? Could you clarify
what is at stake in this disagreement with Agamben about the condition
of naked life and the potentiality of the body? More specifically, how
do you understand the relationship between the condition of naked life
and the potentiality of the multitude?

Hardt: It's a methodological question. Agamben's use of the term opens
up important possibilities, but it also closes some off. His work is
valuable for understanding what the sovereign does and so forth. Our
differences with Agamben all turn around bare life, it's power and its
potentials. Toni and I are trying to do work to help recognise the
fullness and power of multitude. And I just don't think that's
Agamben's project. And I'm not sure I see his project as helpful for
that. The concept of bare life doesn't seem to me to allow for
recognising this power (of the multitude).

Q: You and Negri seem to suggest that biopolitics is a new trait,
specific to contemporary capitalism and anti-capitalism. Is there a
biopower or biopolitics prior to post-fordism? Couldn't was say that
child-rearing, for instance, is a production of life and of social
life?

Hardt: It's impossible to deny what you're saying. Foucault says that
'what's at stake in power is life itself' and of course all of power
is always directed at life. But I would want to say that there's a new
prominence and a new capacity for multitude, which Toni and I want to
call biopolitics. It's along the line of what I was saying before
about the forms of organisation that are desirable, which are now
found in some ways already in labour.

Q: Lately we've been discussing emergency, emergencies. How do you
understand the relationship between emergency and emergence -- or, in
different terms, between constituted and constituent power -- and what
is at stake in the arguments about the different ways they can be
understood?

Hardt: I love that pairing of emergence and emergency. I wish I had
more to say about it. In some ways it's a reformulation of some
arguments about crisis, that crisis is provoked rather than the
product of objective contradictions. I wonder, though, if the idea of
emergence implies an idea of a thing that is pre-existent -- in the
sense that it seemed to me earlier you were implying that the human
capacities for communism are not historical but always already
existing. It may not have to imply such pre-existence, but if it does
then that's not as interesting to me. It's important to note, in any
case, that crises are products of creativity and are also themselves
moments of creativity, creative possibilities that open up.

Q: I don't mean to say communism is pre-existent or spontaneous, or to
minimise the need for organisation. There's no struggle without
organizing. Sergio Bologna says that even moments that get held up as
spontaneous are actually the result of inadequately understood
micro-processes of struggle and organisation. At the same time, it's
important to insist that any location whatsoever is a place where
organising can begin.

There are versions of Marxism that consign some people to being
totally exhausted, reified, inert, and incapable of self-activity in
any communist sense. It's a theory of people as weak, limited,
powerless - exemplified in Leninists who say workers are objectively
limited, only able to achieve 'trade union consciousness' on their
own, and so they need the party to enlighten and lead them. You and
Negri, however, seem to emphasise that everyone is capable of
autonomous self-activity today, that workers can get past trade union
consciousness today, which is I think why many Leninists don't like
your work. On the other hand, your emphasis on 'capable today' -- as
opposed to 'still capable' - implies that there were people who were
yesterday incapable of this activity, that some workers were unable to
act autonomously without the role played by the party or something
similar.

Hardt: I don't know how to avoid making implied claims about the past
here: as you pointed out, insisting on 'still capable' implies a
pre-existing capacity for communism, but insisting on 'capable today'
implies 'incapable yesterday', a prior incapacity for communism.
Neither is satisfactory, but if pressed I prefer the former.

I don't really see that there has to be a conflict here between the
two statements. I appreciate that you want to stand up for the dignity
of past struggles, but to say that we have learned from them, that we
are more powerful because of them, that we stand on their shoulders
today: that doesn't denigrate them in any way. On the contrary! What
better way to recognise their power and success?

Q: You argue that the 'war on terror' and permanent social war that we
are now living in has been made possible through the suspension of
'real' democracy. Are you then suggesting that the defence of
democratic rights (civil liberties, privacy and human rights) is
sufficient to the task of realising 'authentic' democracy or does
militant resistance require something more innovative and creative? If
so, what do you think that might look like -- specifically, in the
context of the 'war on terror' and the states of emergency it creates?

Hardt: To be clear, no one is saying that things were great before the
suspension of rights and so on in the War on Terror. But we can and
should fight against the attacks on these rights, and that doesn't at
all imply that the moment before those attacks was somehow one of
authentic democracy or a moment that we want to go back to.

Q: The idea that resistance is ontologically prior to, and
constitutive of, power is one of the central currents in your writing
with Negri. It seems fair to say, though, that capital also has a
creative capacity to be fluid and adaptive -- absorbing the obstacles,
contradictions and conflicts put in its path (for example, post-1968
demands for the refusal of work, abolition of the state) in order to
move forward again and produce new kinds techniques of violence,
subjugation and wage slavery (for example, the mobile and flexible
paradigm of post-fordism). Could you speak on the importance of the
idea of ontological priority in the political project of the
multitude, and on the question of power being productive as well?

Hardt: Certainly, yes. I don't think there's any way to deny that the
sovereign and capital has some power to act, to do things and shape
outcomes of things. I mean, if we give accounts based on our power and
we don't take into account the power of the sovereign and capital then
it seems to me that our accounts will just be lacking in some way,
they won't be true to our experiences or to what happened.

Q: Does this mean you disagree with Deleuze's or Tronti's ideas that
resistance (or the working class) is ontologically prior and that
production always flows from the bottom up?

Hardt: I don't think so. First of all, both Deleuze and Tronti are
posing the claims in a compensatory fashion. Against the assumption
that capital or power is the only actor, they insist that resistance
is also an important actor. But, secondly, they go further than that,
because they pose a different quality to the two sides. To use
Deleuze's terms from his book on Nietzsche, one could say that capital
is only reactive whereas only the workers' struggle is active and
creative. That does not mean that capital cannot exert enormous power.
Of course, it can. It means simply that capital's power is always
based on resentment, that it is always aimed at the threat of the
other. Only the working class can create autonomously. That difference
in quality is what they are pointing to and that seems an important
point to me.
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