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July 10, 2004
Hardt & Negri say that though recognizing a common enemy and inventing a common language of struggles are certainly important political tasks, it is not onethat they are concerned with. They say that Marx's language has seen its day:
"Marx tried to understand the continuity of the cycle of proletarian struggles that were emerging in nineteenth-century Europe in terms of a mole and its subterranean tunnels. Marx's mole would surface in times of open class conflict and then retreat underground again-not to hibernate passively but to burrow its tunnels, moving along with the times, pushing forward with history so that when the time was right (1830, 1848, 1870), it would spring to the surface again. "Well grubbed old mole." Well, we suspect that Marx's old mole has finally died."
They say that the depths of the modern world and its subterranean passageways have all become superficial in postmodernity. Today's struggles slither silently across these superficial, imperial landscapes--hence the image of the snake.
They say that simply by focusing their own powers, concentrating their energies in a tense and compact coil, these serpentine struggles strike directly at the highest articulations of imperial order. Empire presents a superficial world, the virtual center of which can be accessed immediately from any point across the surface.
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