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Empire: serpentine struggles

If Marx's old revolutionary mole has died, what then? How does the multitude's serpentine struggles work?

Hardt & Negri say:

"It is certainly true that the serpentine struggles we are witnessing today do not provide any clear revolutionary tactics, or maybe they are completely incomprehensible from the point of view of tactics. Faced as we are with a series of intense subversive social movements that attack the highest levels of imperial organization, however, it may be no longer useful to insist on the old distinction between strategy and tactics. In the constitution of Empire there is no longer an "outside" to power and thus no longer weak links- if by weak link we mean an external point where the articulations of global power are vulnerable...the construction of Empire, and the globalization of economic and cultural relationships, means that the virtual center of Empire can be attacked from any point. The tactical preoccupations of the old revolutionary school are thus completely irretrievable; the only strategy available to the struggles is that of a constituent counterpower that emerges from within Empire."

They say that those who have difficulty accepting the novelty and revolutionary potential of this situation from the perspective of the struggles themselves, might recognize it more easily from the perspective of imperial power, which is constrained to react to the struggles.

So how does imperial power see these serpentine struggles? Hardt and Negri say:

"Imperial power whispers the names of the struggles in order to charm them into passivity, to construct a mystified image of them, but most important to discover which processes of globalization are possible and which are not. In this contradictory and paradoxical way the imperial processes of globalization assume these events, recognizing them as both limits and opportunities to recalibrate Empire's own instruments. The processes of globalization would not exist or would come to a halt if they were not continually both frustrated and driven by these explosions of the multitude that touch immediately on the highest levels of imperial power."

An example would help illuminate what they are getting at.

However, that is where they finish the section called The Mole and the Snake to move onto the section entitled the Two-Headed Eagle

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at July 12, 2004 11:57 PM | TrackBack