Frasi di Toni Negri

pagina 2

“Potere Operaio viene da una tradizione alla quale io ho partecipato, però viene dai Quaderni Rossi. Potere Operaio ha degli ascendenti che sono degli ascendenti interamente impiantati nella storia del movimento operaio italiano.”

“Mantenendosi all'opposizione si rischia di rimanere incischiati. Occorre passare dalla resistenza all'alternativa e individuare se e come i movimenti possano conquistare autonomia e liberarsi dalle relazione di potere della modernità.”

“Devo dire che rispetto all'infamia resto del mio parere; e il fatto che un mafioso possa esprimersi come me, significa semplicemente che anche dietro un mafioso c'è probabilmente un uomo.”

“Ma vede… il problema è, appunto, che non è vero che l'organizzazione… ma chi? La segreteria soggettiva, la redazione di Rosso? La segreteria soggettiva non esiste, la redazione di Rosso era fatta da dei giornalisti. Poi c'erano i gruppi che venivano da tutti i quartieri milanesi, che si ritrovavano in piazza e si comportavano qualche volta, attraverso un coordinamento, tra loro, ma non attraverso il comando di un’organizzazione centrale. Era questa la forza del movimento. Ma come può pretendere che un professore universitario nella sua facoltà, che oltretutto era anche molto poco in Italia perché insegnavo a Parigi eccetera, così, potesse inventarsi una macchina di questo genere: migliaia e migliaia, centinaia di migliaia di persone in piazza? Ma come poteva, come si può immaginare una cosa di questo genere, e in più di distribuire bottiglie molotov e armi?”

“Ero a Parigi e Craxi, allora presidente del Consiglio, mi fece sapere che i servizi stavano architettando qualcosa su di me, consigliandomi di essere cauto. Per questo ancora gli sono grato.”

“L'altermodernità ci indroduce alla distinzione tra socialismo e comunismo. Mentre il socialismo oscilla ambiguamente tra modernità e antimodernità, il comunismo deve rompere risolutamente con entrambe istituendo una relazione diretta con il comune come premessa per disegnare la traiettoria dell'antimodernità.”

“Mi spiace per Berlusconi. Le persone che si dichiarano perseguitate mi sono simpatiche.”

“Pur essendo Berlusconi un mio avversario politico, io sono solidale con lui e con chiunque venga condannato ad anni di carcere da una magistratura come quella italiana che si è di volta in volta alleata con la destra e con la sinistra. Le operazioni giudiziarie, condotte contro di me e contro l'Autonomia negli anni Settanta con la complicità della sinistra, sono state una premessa alle successive cospirazioni giudiziarie contro i socialisti ieri e contro i berlusconiani oggi.”

“Qui il problema grosso è decidere che cosa è l'organizzazione. Evidentemente, nel mese di maggio del 1977, ci furono delle norme di risposta senz'altro molto violente. Mai l'organizzazione, della quale io feci parte, promosse dei momenti militari di piazza in termini espliciti.”

“Il problema non era quello della lotta armata, a Rosolina. Non fu il problema della lotta armata ma fu il problema di quello che era l'organizzazione dell'Autonomia, di un contropotere di massa. È molto difficile spiegare questa grossa differenza perché tutto quello che è avvenuto dopo ha appiattito completamente le posizioni dell'Autonomia sulle posizioni delle Brigate Rosse, dei gruppi terroristici in quanto tali. In realtà, fin da allora, si trattava, invece, di una posizione estremamente separata, divisa… di una posizione che l'Autonomia sviluppava contro la lotta armata così come veniva definendosi da parte delle Brigate Rosse.”

“No, io sono estremamente impietoso con me stesso. Posso difendere ciascun momento della mia attività, ma quando devo guardare alla mia vita, dico: "No, non funzionava", o "Comunque bisogna andare avanti". Io posso difendere ciascuna delle mie decisioni, ma sarei assolutamente pazzo se dicessi… ma quando mai la vita di una persona è sufficiente a portare avanti quello che pensa, i desideri che si hanno e soprattutto a evitare gli errori che si fanno?”

“[Sulle dichiarazioni favorevoli alla violenza rivoluzionaria] Tutta la stampa del periodo dell'estrema sinistra, da il manifesto a Lotta Continua, dai giornali di Avanguardia operaia a quelli del Movimento Studentesco, che in quegli anni si esprimevano in questi termini… questo non significa assolutamente che la rivendicazione di un certo fondamentale leninismo del movimento fosse di per sé produttrice di effetti militari e di effetti, al limite, omicidi, come abbiamo riconosciuto, come abbiamo visto poi. Non riesco a capire come si possa innestare il terrorismo successivo a questo tipo di dichiarazioni.”

“Potere Operaio viene da una tradizione alla quale io ho partecipato, però viene dai Quaderni Rossi.”

“The old form of trade union, which was born in the nineteenth century and aimed primarily at negotiating wages for a specific trase is no longer sufficient. First of all, as we have been argueing, the old trade unions are not able to represent the unemployed, the poor, or even the mobile and flexible post-Fordist workers with short term contracts, all of whom participate actively in social production and increase social wealth. Second, the old unions are divided according to the various products and tasks defined in the heyday of industrial production - a miners' union, a pipefitters' union, a machinists' union and so forth. Today, insofar as the conditions and the relations of labor are becoming common, these traditional divisions (or even newly defined divisions) no longer make sense and serve only as an obstacle. Finally the old unions have become purely economic, not political, organization.”

“conventional terms such as service work, intellectual labor, and cognitive labor all refer to aspects of immaterial labor, but none of them captures its generality. As an initial approach, one can concieve immaterial labor in two principle forms. The first for refers to labor, that is primarily intellectual or linguistic such as problem solving, symbolic and analytical tasks, and linguistic expressions. This kind of immaterial labor produces ideas, symbols, codes, texts, linguistic figures, images and other such products. We call the other principle form of immaterial labor "affective labor."”

“Today we have arrived at a point when the thre principles [of modern resistance: 1. measure of efficacy, 2. the form of political and military organization correspond to the currest forms of economic and social production, 3. democracy and freedom] coincide. The distributed network structure provides the model for an absolutely democratic organization that corresponds to the dominant forms of economic and social production and is also the most poweful weapon against the rulin power structure.”

“It is a commonplace of the classical literature on Empire, from Polybius to Montesquieu and Gibbon, that Empire is from its inception decadent and corrupt.”

“The possibility of democracy on a global scale is emerging today for the very first time.”

“Fleeing from a life of constant insecurity and forced mobility is good preparation for dealing with and resisting the typical forms of exploitation of immaterial labor.”

“The regular rhythms of factory production and its clear divisions of work time and nonwork time tend to decline in the realm of immaterial labor. Think how at the high end of labor market companies like Microsoft try to make the office more like home, offering free meals and exercise programs to keep employees in the office as many of their waking hours as possible. At the low end of the labor market workers have to juggle several job to make ends meet. Such practices always existed, but today, with the passage from Fordism to post-Fordism, the increased flexibility and mobility imposed on workers, and the decline of the stable, long-term employment typical of factory work, this tends to become the norm. At both the high end and low ends or labor market the new paradigm undermines the division between work time and the time of life.”

“The groups are not unified under any single authoritiy but rather relate to each other in a network structure. Social forums, affinity groups, and other forms of democratic decision-making are the basis of the movements, and they manage to act together based on what they have in common. … These globalization protest movements are obviously limited in many regards. First of all, although their vision and desire is global in scope, they have thus far only involved significant numbers in North America and Europe. Second, so long, as they remain merely protests movements, traveling from one summit meeting to the next, they will be incapable of becoming a foundational struggle and of articulating an alternative to social relations. These limitations may only be temporary obstacles, and the movements may discover ways to overcome them.”

“Some economists also use the terms Fordism and pos-Fordism to mark the shift from an economy characterized by the stable-long-term employment typical of factory workers to one marked by flexible, mobile, and precarious labor relations: flexible because workers have to adapt to different tasks, mobile because workers have to move frequently between jobs, and precarious because no contracts guarantee stable, long-term employment. Whereas economic modernization, which developed Fordist labor relations, centered on the conomies of scale and larga systems of production and exchange, economic postmodernization, with its post-Fordist labor relations, develops smaller-scale, flexible systems.”

“Our claim is that a common political project is possible. This possibility of course will have to be verified and realized in practice. … We are capable of democracy. The challange is to organize it politically.”

“in any economic system there are numerous different forms of labor that exist side by side, but there is always one figure of labor that exerts hegemony over the others. This hegemonic figure serves as a vortex that gradually transforms other figures to adopt its central qualities.”

“[on zapatistas] The goal has never been to defeat the state and claim sovereign authority but rather to change the world without taking power.”

“All of those who are "without" - without employment, without residence, without housing - are really exluded only in part.”

“[No] effective blueprint [of a political alternative to Empire] will ever arise from a theoretical articulation such as ours.”

“Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and healthy acts.”

“this is not to say, we repeat, that the conditions of labor and production are becoming the same throughout the world or throughout the different sectors ot the economy. The claim is rather is that many singular instances of labor processes, productive conditions, local situations, and lived experiences coexist with a "becoming common", at a different level of abstraction, of the forms of labor and the general relations of production and exchange - and that there is no contradiction between this singularity and commonality.”

“we will argue that the dominant form of contemporary production, which exerts its hegemony over the others, creates "immaterial goods" such as ideas, knowledge, forms of communication, and relationships. … what is produced in this case is not just material goods but actual social relationships and forms of life. We will call this kind of production "biopolitical" to highlight how general its products are and how directily it engages social life in its entirety.”

“The so-called communism of capital, that is, its drive toward an ever more extensive socialization of labor, points ambiguously toward the communism of the multitude.”

“Just sit back and listen to some of the clamorous grievances against the contemporary global system. Our list does not pretend to be comprehensive, and the partiality of its selections will undoubtedly reveal our own blindnesses, but it should nonetheless give a sense of the range and depth of today's grievances.”

“It is not easy for any of us to stop measuring the world against the standard of Europe, but the concept of the multitude requires it of us. It is a challenge. Embrace it.”

“The capitalist call workers to the factory, for example, directing them to collaborate and communicate in production and giving them the means to do so. In the paradigm of immaterial production, in contrast, labor itself tends to produce the means of interaction, communication, and cooperation for production directly. Affective labor always directly constructs a relationship.”

“Empire is emerging today as the center that supports the globalization of productive networks and casts its widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within its world order — and yet at the same time it deploys a powerful police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves who threaten its order.”

“In faxt, the old Marxist distinctions between productive and unproductive labor, as well as that between productive and reproductive labor, which were always dubious, should now be completely thrown out.”

“The poor are thought to be dangerous, either morally dangerous because they are unproductive social parasites - thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts, and the like - or potentially dangerous because they are disorganized, unpredicatble, and tendentially reactionary. In fact the term lumpenproletariat (or rad proletariat) has functioned for times to demonize the poor as a whole. … The industrial reserve army is a constant threat hanging over the heads of the existing working class because, first of all, its misery serves as a terrifying example to workers of what could happen to them, and, second, the excess supply of labor it represents lowes the costs of labor and undermines workers' power against employers (by serving potentially as strike breakers, for example).”

“what is called the flexibility of the labor market means that no job is secure. There is no longer a clear division but rather a large gray area in which all workers hover precariously between employment and unemployment. Second there is no "reserve" in the sense that no labor power is outside the process of social production. The poor, the unemployed, and the underemployed in our societies are in fact active in social production even when they do not have a waged position.”

“It is no coincidence that the ABM Treaty was signed midway between the delinking of the U. S. dollar from the gold standard in 1971 and the first oil crisis in 1973. These were the years not only of monetary and economic crises but also of both the beginning of the destruction of the welfare state and the shift of the hegemony of economic production from the factory to more social and immaterial sectors. One might think of these various transformations as different faces of one common phenomenon, one grand social transformation.”

“When the general population no longer constitutes the armed forces, when the army is no longer the people in arms, then empires fall. Today all armies are again tending to become mercenary armies.”

“A multitude is irreducible multiplicity; the singular social differences that constitute the multitude must always be expressed and can never be flattened into sameness, unity, identity, or indifference. … the compact identities of factory workers in the dominant countries have been undermined with the rise of short-term contracts and forced mobility of new forms of work; how migration has challenged traditional notions of national identity; how familiy identity has changed and so forth.”

“Empire is a very stimulating account of globalisation, but it is hopelessly wrong on two central issues. The state has not withered away. Strong states still exist—USA, China, Germany, etc—but the difference with the past is that there is now only one Empire and this is not the nebulous entity imagined by Cultural Studies, but a real, living organism and it has a name; the United States of America.”