Yesterday Globalproject.info published an interview with Antonio Negri, in which Negri comments on the victory of Barack Obama. “Behind this victory, the great multitudinarian struggle” is the title of the article. Here’s a quick translation, corrections welcome.
Behind this victory, the great multitudinarian struggle
Interview with Prof. Antonio Negri
Published 5 November 2008 at Globalproject.info
Let’s say it immediately: in a central country of the world - a country which was central also for the modern tragedy of slavery - there is another “face of color” which, after Lula, has risen to power. This already seems to me as a very important thing, from the symbolical point of view, which leaves one absolutely astonished for the profound radicality and novelty. The one to rise to power is a “dirty nigger”, and this thing seems absolutely enormous.
50 years ago this struggle begun in the United States, and now it has arrived to express itself. Behind this victory there is the great multitudinarian struggle, or more precisely, the sum of three struggles, at least: the class struggle, the gender struggle and the “race” struggle.
These three movements of struggle are uniting and coming together in the multitude, forgetting their own identities, their inevitable corporatisms and egoisms, they have set themselves in motion to redefine, not the people, but this active reality, this constituent power which is moving in the reality.
These phenomena have been always covered by the falseness and deception constituted by the communication dominated by the powers-that-be. But now this powerful reality has managed to blow away the cage in which it has been trapped.
A dimension which, in the crisis of globalization, has found the power to express itself in a radical way.
When we begun to speak about globalization as a phenomenon which breaks the order of things, also on the left many reminded us about the necessity of territorialization of power and struggle. The latter is absolutely true, but when they criticized the potential of rupture in globalization, they seemed to forget how profound changes it brought.
Concerning the question of “race”, the mechanism of exploitation of colored workforce through migrations and through slavery brought these phenomena in the center of the power. As long as people weren’t able to reveal and subvert the coloniality of the power, and to set it in the center of historical development - people remained mute and out of the game; from this point of view, globalization has been extremely important.
Behind the victory of Obama is the capacity to encounter also this election in a different way. The protagonism of millions of people, the fact that new generations, and migrants entered the arena, make this election different.
After the enthusiasm of the victory and after the complicated electoral campaign, which was difficult to comprehend - and particularly the program of Obama himself was difficult to comprehend - there are some problems that should be confronted even before the official inauguration in January. With respect to these problems we will be able to evaluate how powerful is the novelty of the impact of Obama’s victory.
The two very urgent problems are the global financial crisis, which is becoming an economic crisis, and peace, the word which Obama seem to have conquered to make a flag of his victory out of it; peace in the Middle East which goes from Israel until Pakistan. The direction which Obama will take in solving these two big problems will make us understand to what extent we are not finding ourselves in front of a umpteenth media spectacle but in front of a real historical and epochal transformation.
An epochal transformation in which the protagonists are the millions of people who have brought this result. In this sense, the rise of Obama has many times been paralleled to the New Deal, to the force through which the New Deal opened class conflicts, around the theme of welfare and keynesianism. What kind of points of contact and above all, what kind of differences are there today?
We all know what New Deal has been. A ruling class which, in the middle of an economic crisis determined by a capitalist development of over-production and by a falsification of all the facts of real economy, managed to invent the re-opening of class struggle. It was the reconstruction of consumption inside a working class which had been exploited and marginalized by grand mechanisms of development. This new deal had profoundly democratic characteristics: the re-opening of class struggle meant for Roosevelt to put the U.S. Constitution in action again and therefore also an utopian and ideal proposal for the whole world. A world which was infected by fascism - it is necessary to remember that the new deal arrives in the historical moment where class struggle was fundamental in order to strike down fascism, even the bourgeoisie understood this.
Today the differences are enormous, because now the struggles are multitudinarian; in fact, they take place and they develop on the entire terrain of society: there’s not only class struggle, there’s also the race struggle and the gender struggle. At least these three elements represent struggles which advance to construct common realities through which it becomes possible to overcome the uncertainty, fear, misery and poverty which capitalism determines with its development.
Now the question is to understand which are the forms in which multitudinarian struggles can be reactivated, in all levels - not only simply economic struggles, but also democratic struggles for rights which manifest themselves as inventions of a new method to manage the relationship between needs, social reproduction and government. Now we are in a situation in which we have seen unbelievable things, we have seen how capitalists have immediately forgot about liberalism in order to make the state serve them, to make the poor pay for everything they themselves have caused; we have seen how liberal-conservative pressure can go in accord with the American social-reformist pressure of the FED and with the European pressure of socialdemocratic capitalists. The big problem of Obama will be how to break off this situation, how to give new protagonism for those who are the subjects of great multitudian struggles. We’ll see if he can.
These things that are happening will necessarily reverberate also here, in our Europe and in our Italy. We talked with others - commenting these elections - of the electoral tide of America which merges with the wave of the Italian movement. These mirrors which reflect each other are creating a lot stronger force.
I hope that this strong reflection could become a kind of solar reflection which, after going through these struggles, through these “lenses”, would burn away the mummified and blocked figure of power in Italy. This monstrous power for which I don’t anymore find adjectives that could describe it: it’s a power which is a bit mafioso, a bit fascist, a bit televisionary, a bit imbecile, always brutal, always disgusting.
These figures like Berlusconi, but also others: the socialdemocratic emptiness of Partito Democratico, the emptiness of the Vatican. When you look at Italy you see something that is so dead sometimes it makes you think that our country really is finished. But… There is this wave, and so, let’s throw ourselves into the wave. But these have even colonized the words: there is Marcello Dell’Utri who says that we need to be optimist. How is it possible to use a word like that after it has been said by him?
Maybe we need to invent a new lexicon, and this is what the movements are doing everywhere in the world…
…sure, but maybe here it’s needed to return to the alphabets rather than to lexicon.
THE END.
Here’s the original text:
http://www.globalproject.info/art-17685.html
