CAPITAL KILLED LAWRENCE DAQUAN DAVIS...IT'S PAST TIME THAT CAPITALISM DIED

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I'll bet you never heard of Lawrence Daquan “Day” Davis.  Why would you?  After all he was just some twenty one year old African American guy who is now dead.  No big deal, right!

Yes, big deal.  Judaism has a good saying, something to the effect, then when the death of one person is equal to the death of an entire universe.  Something like that.

Day should be alive and enjoying his young life, but capitalism killed him.  One big corporation with no incentive to train a young, new employe, with no incentive to care if he lived or he died, DIDN'T, and he did.

Day Davis was one of those temporary workers, what some of us call a precarious worker.  Day was according to Workers Comp Insider:

... just a few months over the legal drinking age in Florida when he began working at the Bacardi Rum bottling plant in Jacksonville. Sadly, he had a very short career. It began on August 16, 2012 and ended shortly before 5 pm on the same day after he was crushed and killed by a palletizer machine. Davis was an employee of Remedy Intelligent Staffing, a temporary staffing agency that was contracted by Bacardi Bottling.

Young, precarious workers are all the rage in the world of Empire.  No one has to provide them much in the way of benefits, wages, stability.  Just use em, and cast em aside. Works well for Capital.  Last August, Bacardi Bottling Corporation, cast Day Davis aside.

It was just before 5 PM when Jacksonville, Florida police arrived at the Bacardi plant and found the lifeless body of Davis inside a piece of equipment.  At the time,  Sgt. Jay Farhat with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office said, "All we know is he was working underneath a piece of heavy equipment and was crushed."

That's all they knew.

Meanwhile, Patricia M. Neal speaking on behalf of Bacardi said:

"Bacardi prides itself as having safety as its number one priority. Our sincerest condolences go out to the family and we're offering on-site counseling and support for our employees."

That was a lie and later investigations have proved it.

First Coast News reported yesterday,

Bacardi Bottling Corp. was cited Monday with 12 safety violations by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration after the August death of a temporary worker on his first day on the job at its Jacksonville facility.

Safety in Bacardi's number one priority.  Yeah, right.

The safety of workers is absolutely not the number anything priority of Capital.  The creation and accumulation of more capital is the number one priority of Capital.  

I'll just bet you Sgt. Farhat has not returned to the scene and has not arrested anyone.  After all if you started arresting every capitalist responsible for the death of this or that worker, well, then there just wouldn't be hardly any capitalists left.

Hmmm.

The following is from EHS Today.

Temporary Worker Killed at Bacardi Bottling, OSHA Says Company Failed to Train

OSHA has cited Bacardi Bottling in Jacksonville, Fla., with willful and serious violations following the death of a temporary worker during his first day at work. Proposed penalties for the violations total $192,000.Sandy Smith
BacardiBacardi’s Web site invites visitors to “Enter the Party,” but working at the Bacardi Bottling Corp. facility in Jacksonville, Fla., where the company bottles all of the rum it distributes to North America led to a tragic end for the short life of Lawrence Daquan “Day” Davis.
Davis, a 20-year-old temporary worker, was killed last August on his first day on the job when he was crushed by a palletizer machine. OSHA cited Bacardi Bottling with 12 alleged OSHA violations.
Davis was an employee of a temporary staffing service, Remedy Intelligent Staffing, which is contracted by Bacardi Bottling to provide workers for certain jobs. OSHA requires that employers protect the health and safety of all workers under their supervision and control, even temporary workers who are employed by other companies.

“A worker’s first day at work shouldn’t be his last day on earth,” said Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health Dr. David Michaels. “Employers are responsible for ensuring the safe conditions of all their employees, including those who are temporary.”
Bacardi sent a statement to EHS Today that says, in part, "As a family-owned company with a long history of operating as an industry leader in workplace safety, Bacardi takes seriously any accident and continues to extend its sincerest condolences to the family. Always looking to improve in safety measures and operational performance, Bacardi conducted additional employee re-training on lockout/tagout procedures, updated safety policies and procedures, and completed a thorough review of all equipment in order to prevent such an accident from happening again."
Davis was cleaning glass from under the hoist of a palletizing machine when an employee restarted the palletizer. Bacardi Bottling had failed to train temporary employees on utilizing locks and tags to prevent the accidental start-up of machines and to ensure its own employees utilized procedures to lock or tag out machines. Proposed penalties for the willful and serious violations total $192,000.
Bacardi said that it worked with OSHA following the incident and "took immediate steps to correct any noted safety concerns identified by the inspector, rather than waiting until after the final report was issued ... The company shares with OSHA the common goals of well-trained employees and safe workplace conditions."
Two alleged willful citations have been issued for failing to develop, document and utilize lockout/tagout procedures for the control of potentially hazardous energy and train temporary workers on lockout/tagout procedures. A willful violation is one committed with intentional knowing or voluntary disregard for the law’s requirements or with plain indifference to worker safety and health.
“We are seeing untrained workers – many of them temporary workers – killed very soon after starting a new job. This must stop,” said Michaels. “Employers must train all employees, including temporary workers, on the hazards specific to that workplace – before they start working. Had Bacardi done so, this tragic loss of life could have been prevented.”
OSHA also cited Bacardi for nine alleged serious violations for exposing workers to trips, struck-by and fire hazards where fixed permanent conveyors crossed through the aisle; obstructing exit routes; exposing workers to falling bottles and debris from overhead conveyors and electrical shock hazards. The employer also failed to provide an adequate number of lockout/tagout devices to perform lockout/tagout procedures of energy sources on various equipment, conduct an adequate periodic review of the energy control procedures, perform servicing and maintenance on machines and equipment without training in the methods and means for energy isolation, and require workers to wear safety goggles and long sleeves when using air guns at 90 pounds per square inch. A serious violation occurs when there is substantial probability that death or serious physical harm could result from a hazard about which the employer knew or should have known.
One alleged other-than-serious violation has been cited for storing a mixing tank within 12 inches of the electrical panel box. An other-than-serious violation is one that has a direct relationship to job safety and health, but probably would not cause death or serious physical harm.
"Bacardi, in its more than 150-year history, has embedded corporate responsibility into all aspects of its business, and with that, continually strives for the highest standards of safety for its employees," the company noted.
Bacardi Bottling has 15 business days from receipt of the citations and proposed penalties to comply, request a conference with OSHA’s area director or contest the findings before the independent Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.

FORT COLLINS AREA GETS FRACKED - COMPANY EXECUTIVE SAYS 84,000 GALLON SPILL AIN'T NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT

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Many towns across the USA are taking up the issue of fracking.  Most people don't seem to interested in having the neighborhood "fracked."  Who can blame them?  Fracking brings with it enormous problems and risks (despite what the oil and gas industry want you to believe).  Gary Wockner, PhD., an environmental activist in Fort Collins Colorado points out four key areas of concern:

Water: Thousands of spills and releases of drilling and fracking chemicals have occurred in drilled and fracked areas of the state, many impacting groundwater and some impacting surface water. Aquifer contamination has occurred. Wells have been poisoned. Water supplies are being stretched even thinner as rivers and farms are poised to be drained for drilling and fracking. 

Air: Two scientific studies - one by CU and another by NOAA - have found serious problems with air quality in heavily drilled and fracked areas of the state. Headaches, nose bleeds, dizziness, and asthma attacks are the most common complaints as methane, ozone, and other cancer-causing chemicals blow into nearby homes and communities.

Property Values: Residents across the state who have wells and drilling permits within a few hundred feet of their homes report difficulties selling their homes, negative impacts on their property values, difficulties buying homeowners insurance, and that mortgages and home equity loans are more heavily scrutinized.

Wildlife: All across the state in drilled and fracked areas, wildlife have been impacted including elk, mule deer, antelope, and sage grouse. Drilling and fracking may cause the Greater Sage Grouse to be listed as Endangered Species, and are increasingly impacting Colorado's hunting and recreational economy.

These, of course, are not the only issues of concern.  Take a look at what happened recently in Ohio where the  owner of an oil and natural gas drilling company accused of dumping more than 20,000 gallons of fracking waste into a tributary of the Mahoning River on Jan. 31 was charged criminally today with violating the federal Clean Water Act.  Ben Lupo is accused of ordering his employees on numerous occasions to dump tainted waste into a storm drain which led into a tributary to the Mahoning River.  The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports:

Employees have told investigators that he ordered them to dump the waste at least 20 times and directed them to lie to investigators about the number of times they dumped the waste, according to documents related to the charges.

Did I forget to mention that Lupo's company, D and L Energy was the owner of a disposal well that Ohio officials have linked to series of earthquakes that shook the Youngstown, Ohio are in 2011 and 2012, 

A battle has been going on for a while now in Fort Collins, Colorado to stop fracking.  That battle is far from over.

However, an "accident" this week might open the eyes of those who are still supporting fracking in and around their town.  Oil laden fracking fluid poured out of an oil well near the city for nearly thirty hours before it was finally stopped.  Fifteen hundred feet away sits the home of some lucky family.  They aren't the only ones nearby, just the closest.

PDC Energy senior vice president of operations, Bart Brookman, quickly stated the accident would cause no environmental problems.  He also said he had no idea how much fluid spilled.  The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission currently estimates about 2,000 barrels or 84,000 gallons of fracking flowback water gushed into the environment during the incident. 

PDC Energy has been involved in 260 mostly small oil and gas spills and releases in Colorado since 2005.

Oh, I see...

The following post indicates old Bart got his facts wrong or "misspoke," and  is from the Coloradoan.



DATA POINTS TO ENVIRONMENTAL, HEALTH IMPACT OF FORT COLLINS-AREA FRACKING ACCIDENT

Green fluid gushes out of oil well for 30 hours: Oil-laden fracking fluid gushed from an oil well near Fort Collins, Colorado for nearly 30 hours before it was stopped.

Written by

Bobby Magill

• 
  

Purchase ImageZOOM

Oil-laden water leaks from an oil well east of Fort Collins Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2013. / V. Richard Haro/The Coloradoan

The gushing fracking water leak has stopped, but many questions remain about its impact.
It took at least 20 people to wrest control of the oil and gas well that spewed a horizontal geyser of green-tinted fracking water for more than 30 hours Monday and Tuesday about four miles east of Fort Collins.
After that crew gained control around 4 p.m. Tuesday, well operator PDC Energy has five days to file a final report to state oil and gas regulators detailing the cause and impact of the accident, PDC Energy Vice President Bart Brockman said Wednesday.
The volume of fluid released still isn’t known, but it will be revealed in PDC Energy’s report to the state, he said.
What that fluid contained and what hazard it posed to the people living in the area are much more complicated questions to answer.
A hydraulic failure caused a piece of equipment to fall and shear off a pin at the well head, breaking a valve and causing the release of a very large amount of “flowback” water, Brockman said.
The well, called the “Ochsner 50-441,” was hydraulically fractured, or fracked, by Halliburton on Feb. 5, according to a report on the industry’s fracking disclosure website, FracFocus.org.
Fracking involves the injection of millions of gallons of water, chemicals and sand into the oil well bore. In this case, Halliburton used 4.09 million gallons of water to frack the Ochsner well.
The chemicals used to frack the well included at least 15 solvents and other chemicals composed of various hydrocarbons, surfactants, salts, sand and other ingredients.
Some of those include petroleum naptha; naphthalene, a possible carcinogen; trimethylbenzene, a toxin not classified as a carcinogen; potasssium chloride, which is sometimes used for lethal injection; a toxic chemical commonly known as Tergitol NP-4; and many others, according to a list available on FracFocus.
“The failure had nothing to do with the hydraulic fracturing process,” Brockman said, calling the fluid that gushed from the well “flowback water” unrelated to fracking.
“During a stage of well completion known as ‘flowback’, fracturing fluids, water and reservoir gas come to the surface at a high velocity and volume,” according to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency fact sheet on proposed EPA oil and gas air quality regulations.
Brockman said that the flowback returning to the surface includes fracking fluid and a lot more: All the hydrocarbons -- crude oil and natural gas -- the well was drilled to produce.
The EPA fact sheet says the flowback contains a high volume of volatile organic compounds and air toxics including benzene, ethylbenzene, and n-hexane.
“The EPA estimates that uncontrolled hydraulically fractured wells may emit 240 times the amount of hazardous air pollutants as an unfractured well,” according to another EPA document. “The concern is that once the well has been hydraulically fractured, the large amount of fluid returns up the well bore to the surface where it was vented, releasing large amounts of hydrocarbons and chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing process into the air.
“These flowback emissions are short-term in nature but are substantial,” according to the EPA.
About 1,000 feet away from the Ochsner well during the leak, a very strong petroleum odor wafted through the air. The nearest home was 1,500 feet away.Brockman said a mechanical failure of this magnitude is rare.
“Operators all through Weld County have smaller spills on a more frequent basis related to their day-to-day operations,” he said.
PDC Energy alone has been involved in 260 mostly small oil and gas spills and releases in Colorado since 2005, according to state records, which show that there have been more than 1,800 such spills, leaks and releases in Weld County and at least 46 in Larimer County since 1992.

LET'S SAY YOU GET SENT TO PRISON, KNOWING YOU DIDN'T DO NOTHING

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Let's say your an African American living in the USA.  Let's say your fifteen.  Let's say you are going about your life.  Let's say you get accused of a horrific crime.  Let's say the cops coerce you into saying, "I did it."  Let's say the media and the rest of the world describe you as a monster and treat you as one, too.  Let's say you didn't do nothing.  Let's say you get sent to prison, knowing you didn't do nothing. Let's say no one believes anything now that you have to say.  Let's say you are Yusef Salem.

The following post for Prison Friday at Scission comes from YCteen.




Growing Up Behind Bars
Yusef Salaam on rebuilding his life after a false conviction
Jovon Ferguson

Yusef Salaam was one of the five teenagers falsely convicted in the brutal rape of a white woman in Central Park in 1989. The convictions were overturned in 2002, when a serial rapist confessed to the crime, but Salaam had already served his full 5½-year term in prison. Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Salaam about his experience and the impact it had on his life.

In person, Salaam carries a dignified, purposeful, and positive aura. He seems to be using his situation as an opportunity to help youth by sharing his message with them.
  www.ycteenmag.orgIn the course of our interview, he touched on the point that when he was exonerated, the media coverage was insignificant in comparison to the press coverage leading up to the conviction. But the documentary The Central Park Five, which chronicles the case (see the review here) has given Salaam and the others a chance to finally share their story. Here’s more of what he had to say.

YCteen: You were 15 at the time. You had no record and had never been arrested. Did your naïvete about the tactics of law enforcement play a role in your being charged with this crime?

Yusef Salaam: None of us really knew what Miranda was back then. [Miranda rights refer to your right not to incriminate yourself after being arrested, including the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney. An officer must make sure you understand these rights.] You don’t feel like you have the right to remain silent—you feel like, “If I don’t say nothing, those guys are going to do something bad to me.”I’m not only talking about the five [of us kids] but also our parents. Some of our parents hadn’t even known anything about the system. Some of them were seen on videotape seeming like they were agreeing with the process that their sons were going through, these false confessions.And unfortunately all of us were led to believe that if we just said we did it, we could go home. People who know the law, they know that’s crazy. But when you beat people down for 12 hours, 36 hours, don’t give them food, drink, you get them in this delirious state.

YCteen: What role did the media play in your conviction?Salaam: I think it was such an attractive case, the way the media was spinning everything—these people from the darker enclaves are emerging out into society and they’re hunting for folks...there was this colorful language that they had to describe us, like a “wolf pack,” and it played to the fears that people had.

Many people, even in the black community, bought into the lie because many of them had been hurt by people who looked like them. I think it was easy for people to assume the worst rather than assume the best. No one had ever heard of us before so it was easy for them to say, “This is who these guys are.”The worst part about it is because of the way [the media and law enforcement] went after us, the intensity with which they went after us, this allowed for the real perpetrator to continue to hurt folks, and ultimately one of his victims he murdered.

YCteen: How did prison affect your life?Salaam: It’s one thing to go to jail knowing you’ve committed a crime. But to be a young person having never done anything wrong and get placed in this system...everything we knew was taken away. We were put in the worst prisons they could possibly find. I went to a maximum security youth facility and people were getting maimed, people were getting hurt, stuff I can’t even describe, and that would go on daily.

It takes so much from you, and that is one of the reasons a lot of people come out of prison really scarred. They come out with post-traumatic stress syndrome, some can’t even function in society anymore. It’s a wonder that we’re doing a little bit OK. But the indelible scars that prison left on us are there, all the time.

YCteen: You completed your prison term and were released before you were exonerated. What was it like trying to get your life back on track?

Salaam: Trying to get back into the community is extremely hard. The years they took us out of society were the years we grew and developed and learned how to be adults. And we were put in a place where we had to learn how to survive. Forget learning to be an adult. Forget learning how to balance a checkbook or drive a car, we had to learn how to stay alive the next day. A lot of us came home to that same reality.

You adapt to [the violence of prison], you learn that that’s your reality and that’s what you do for years upon years. So to come out of that....That post-traumatic stress is there. It’s a struggle.This wasn’t just a 5 to 10 year sentence, this was a death sentence. What I mean is, if we survived prison, we weren’t supposed to survive on the street after prison. We were supposed to come back through that revolving door because you can’t take it [on the outside].
image by YC-Art DeptWe were also labeled Level 3 sex offenders, and that meant we were going to have to register [with law enforcement] for the rest of our lives. In society, every door would be slammed in our faces.

YCteen: Twelve years after you were convicted, the real perpetrator came forward and confessed, and you were exonerated in 2002. What was that like?

Salaam: Being officially exonerated was exhilarating. But the public didn’t start viewing us differently until after this film [The Central Park Five] came out. News of the exonerations was quickly swept under the rug, so some folks who never saw this film [still] think we got free from prison because of some technicality, and that we were really guilty of the crimes.The great thing this film is doing is causing people’s minds and hearts to change. It’s the same story that’s been [told before]. The difference is, now we’re talking about what happened in the process of obtaining those video confessions. We’re talking about what happened to us through this whole process. We’re talking about trying to get our lives back together. And that is changing a lot.

YCteen: Do you feel bitter about what happened to you?

Salaam: I think all of us got to this point where we accepted what life had given us. We didn’t know if we were going to live or die, if we were ever going to be vindicated. I came home to the reality that I was accused of this crime and I could never escape it. Everybody I met I would have to at some point tell them that I was accused of this crime and I didn’t do it. Some folks would believe me and some folks wouldn’t.

But if you hold bitterness inside it’s going to kill you, so better to take that energy and try to do something productive. Some of us got our college degrees in prison; that was a step toward saying at least when we get out of this we might have some type of future.

YCteen: What can young people today learn from what you went through?

Salaam: People always say, “You shouldn’t talk to the cops, don’t say nothing.” But you can’t not say nothing, because they have tactics and skills that will cause you to say something. Instead, you should ask for a lawyer. Make that your mantra. They’re going to try to make you feel like, “Why do you need a lawyer—did you do something wrong?” But it’s your right to have a lawyer.

---

Know Your Rights
If you’re stopped by the police:
• Stay calm and be cool.
• Don’t physically resist.
• Don’t run!
• Give your name and address, but you don’t have to give any other information.
• Try to remember the badge number, name, and a physical description of the cop(s) who stopped or arrested you.
• When cops stop you, ask bystanders to stand at a discreet distance and observe the police without interfering.
If you’re arrested:
• Once you are told you are under arrest, give your name and address; give your parents and/or employer’s name, address, and telephone number. (This information is needed in setting bail.)
• You have the right to remain silent. Besides giving the above information, only say, “I want to talk to a lawyer.”
• Don’t talk to the police, on videotape, or to a District Attorney about anything that has to do with the crime you are arrested for. Do not sign anything.
• Do not talk to inmates in jail about your case.
If you are 16 or younger:
• Cops can stop you if you are hanging out during school time or if they suspect that you are a runaway. That means any time they want to.
• Always carry ID, otherwise the cops will use your lack of identification as an excuse to take you in.
• If the police arrest you, they must notify your parents!
• If you are arrested, you have the right to make one call to your family or lawyer.


Provided by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. For more information go to mxgm.org or call the New York chapter at 718-254-8800.

MARX'S MOLE IS DEAD - HARDT AND NEGRI

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It is Theoretical Weekends and if you are not up for another long post, I would advise you to move right along.  As the introduction to this atlibcom.org says, 

"This text is effectively a summary of the arguments in Empire, in particular Negri & Hardt’s contention that Marx’s conception of class struggle is obsolete and that globalisation can be understood as capitalism's response to class struggle (7,000 words)."

NOTE: I am not sure that I agree with the introduction's statement that Negri and Hart contend that, "Marx's conception of class struggle is obsolete..."  I think it is more of a conception that the typical, orthodox notion of what Marx meant by class struggle is obsolete (and always was).

So here goes...
MARX'S MOLE IS DEAD! - GLOBALISATION AND COMMUNICATION
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

 In our book[1], we propose a single concept, Empire, which is meant to name the political form of globalisation. Our primary question is, what is the political constitution of global order? 
We use Empire to name the new form of sovereignty, a new form of political rule. Many argue that the globalisation of capitalist production and exchange means that economic relations have become more autonomous from political controls, and consequently that political sovereignty has declined. Some celebrate this new era as the liberation of the capitalist economy from the restrictions and distortions that political forces have imposed on it; others lament it as the closing of the institutional channels through which workers and citizens can influence or contest the cold logic of capitalist profit. It is certainly true that in step with the processes of globalisation the sovereignty of nation states, while still important, has progressively declined. The primary factors of production and exchange - money, technology, people and goods - move with increasing ease across national boundaries; hence the nation state has less and less power to regulate these flows and impose its authority over the economy. Even the most dominant nation states should no longer be thought of as supreme and sovereign authorities, neither outside nor even within their own borders. The declining sovereignty of nation states, however, does not mean that sovereignty as such has declined! Throughout the contemporary transformations, political controls, state functions and regulatory mechanisms continue to rule the realm of economic and social production and exchange. Our basic hypothesis, then, is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire.
We reject two hypotheses:1. that there is a single, locatable source that dictates global order, that rules the globe: Washington, New York, Geneva, Tokyo (conspiracy theory);
2. that global order arises spontaneously from the anarchic interplay of global exchanges, from market forces (invisible hand) - in effect that there is not global order, only an economic dynamic that has finally freed itself from the regulation of the nation states and all other political fetters.Between these two extremes we try to read the contemporary global political order as a mixed constitution. Mixed constitution is the term that Polybius uses to describe (and celebrate) the ancient Roman Empire. The ancient Roman Empire was a mixed constitution, according to Polybius, in that it brought together in a single constitution all three primary forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. In other words, in Empire monarchic, aristocratic and democratic powers all function together. Today, it sometimes appears that there is a single monarchic power that rules the world: during the Gulf War, for example, it seemed that the Pentagon was a monarchic global power; at other times the IMF might appear that way; at others Hollywood? On the other hand, sometimes it appears that aristocratic forces rule the world. Not the rule of the one but the rule of the few. Transnational corporations are aristocratic in this sense, as are often the nation states. Finally, there are those "democratic" powers, those that at least claim to represent the people. Nation states often fill this role too on the global scene, but the most interesting and complex democratic forces in Empire are the NGOs. In any case, a theory of mixed constitution allows us to recognise all of these powers within one coherent global constitution, but does not force us to claim that these forces are uniform or univocal. A theory of mixed constitution is a theory of difference within the constitution that allows for various separations of powers within the framework of a single order. The challenge then for our notion of the contemporary Empire as a mixed constitution is to discover what the various powers are and how they interact and negotiate with or dominate each other, in concert and in conflict. That's the difficult part. Mixed constitution only names the problematic; it doesn't really describe the dynamics of rule. But I hope it gives you a first approach to the framework in which we conceive Empire.The declining sovereignty of nation states and their increasing inability to regulate economic and cultural changes is in fact one of the primary symptoms of the coming of Empire. The sovereignty of the nation state was the cornerstone of the imperialisms that European powers constructed throughout the modern era. By "Empire", however, we understand something altogether different from "imperialism". The boundaries defined by the modern system of nation states were fundamental to European colonialism and economic expansion: the territorial boundaries of the nation delimited the centre of power from which rule was exerted over external, foreign territories through a system of channels and barriers that alternately facilitated and obstructed the flows of production and circulation. Imperialism was really an extension of the sovereignty of the European nation states beyond their own boundaries. Eventually nearly all the world's territories could be parcelled out and the entire world map could be coded in European colours: red for British territory, blue for French, green for Portuguese and so forth. Whatever modern sovereignty took root, it constructed a transcendent Leviathan that overarched its social domain and imposed hierarchical territorial boundaries, both to police the purity of its own identity and to exclude all that was other.No limitsThe passage to Empire emerges from the twilight of modern sovereignty. In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial centre of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorialising apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colours of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.We should emphasise that we use Empire here not as a metaphor, which would require demonstration of the resemblances between today's world order and the Empires of Rome, China, the Americas and so forth, but rather as a concept, which calls primarily for a theoretical approach. The concept of Empire is characterised fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire's rule has no limits.First and foremost, then, the concept of Empire poses a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really that rules over the entire "civilised" world. No territorial boundaries limit its reign. Second, the concept of Empire presents itself not as a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity. From the perspective of Empire, this is the way things will always be and the way they were always meant to be. In other words, Empire presents its rule not as a transitory moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with no temporal boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history. Third, the rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depths of the social world. Empire not only manages a territory and a population, but also creates the very world it inhabits. It not only regulates human interactions, but also seeks directly to rule over human nature. The object of its rule is social life in its entirety, and thus Empire presents the paradigmatic form of biopower. Finally, although the practice of Empire continually bathered in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace - a perpetual and universal peace outside of history.A methodological pointThe relationship between Italian politics and French philosophy is an interesting one, specifically the relationship between the Italian tradition of operaismo and autonomia on one hand and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze on the other. There is a central point of commonality here and that is a methodological point, or really an axiom of research. On Deleuze's side, this axiom is that desire is active and power is reactive. Or rather, with respect to power, "La résistence est première". Resistance is temporally and ontologically prior to power.Operaismo builds on Marx's claim that capital reacts to the struggles of the working class; the working class is active and capital reactive.Technological development: Where there are strikes, machines will follow. "It would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working-class revolt." (Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 15, Section 5)Political development: The factory legislation in England was a response to the working class struggle over the length of the working day. "Their formulation, official recognition and proclamation by the State were the result of a long class struggle." (Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 10, Section 6)Operaismo takes this as its fundamental axiom: the struggles of the working class precede and prefigure the successive re-structurations of capital.We will present an example of this methodology or this axiom in the relationship between social struggles and globalisation, or rather, the relationship between international cycles of struggles and capitalist globalisation.Call to globalityFlirting with Hegel, one could say that the construction of Empire is good in itself but not for itself. One of the most powerful operations of the modern imperialist power structures was to drive wedges among the masses of the globe, dividing them into opposing camps, or really a myriad of conflicting parties. Segments of the proletariat in the dominant countries were even led to believe that their interests were tied exclusively to their national identity and imperialist destiny. The most significant instance of revolt and revolution against these modern power structures therefore were those that posed the struggle against exploitation together with the struggle against nationalism, colonialism and imperialism. Through these events, humanity appeared for a magical moment to be united by a common desire for liberation and we seemed to catch a glimpse of a future when the modern mechanisms of domination would once and for all be destroyed. The revolting masses, their desire for liberation, their experiments to construct alternatives and their instances of constituent power have all at their best moments pointed toward the internationalisation and globalisation of relationships, beyond the divisions of national, colonial and imperialist rule. In our time this desire that was set in motion by the multitude has been addressed (in a strange and perverted but nonetheless real way) by the construction of Empire. One might even say that the construction of Empire and its global networks is a response to the various struggles against the modern machines of power and specifically to class struggle driven by the multitude's desire for liberation. The multitude called Empire into being.Saying that Empire is good in itself, however, does not mean that it is good for itself. Although Empire may have played a role in putting and end to colonialism and imperialism, it nonetheless constructs its own relationships of power based on exploitation that are in many respects more brutal than those it destroyed. The end of the dialectic of modernity has not resulted in the end of the dialectic of exploitation. Today nearly all of humanity is to some degree absorbed within or subordinated to the networks of capitalist exploitation. We see now an ever more extreme condition of radical separation of a small minority that controls enormous wealth from multitudes that live in poverty at the limit of powerlessness. The geographical and racial lines of oppression and exploitation that were established during the era of colonialism and imperialism have in many respects not declined but instead increased exponentially.Despite recognising all this, we insist on asserting that the construction of Empire is a step forward on order to do away with any nostalgia for the power structures that preceded it and refuse any political strategy that involves returning to that old arrangement, such as trying to resurrect the nation state to protect us against global capital. We claim that Empire is better in the same way that Marx insists that capitalism is better than the forms of society and modes of production that came before it. Marx's view is grounded on a healthy and lucid disgust for the parochial and rigid hierarchies that preceded capitalist society as well as on a recognition that the potential for liberation is increased in the new situation. In the same way today we can see that Empire does away with the cruel regimes of modern power and also increases the potential for liberation.We are well aware that in affirming this thesis we are swimming against the current of our friends and comrades on the Left. In the long decades of the crisis of the communist, socialist and liberal Left that has followed the 1960s, a large portion of critical thought, both in the dominant countries of capitalist-development and in the subordinated ones, has sought to recompense sites of resistance that are founded on the identities of social subjects or national and regional groups, often grounding political analysis on the localisation of struggles. Such arguments are sometimes constructed in terms of "place-based" movements or politics, in which the boundaries of place (conceived either as identity or territory) are posed against the undifferentiated and homogeneous space of global networks. Other times such political arguments draw on the long tradition of Leftist nationalism in which (in the best cases) the nation is conceived as the primary mechanism of defence against the domination of foreign and/or global capital. Today the operative syllogism at the heart of the precarious forms of "local" Leftist strategy seems to be entirely reactive: If capitalist domination is becoming ever more global, then our resistances to it must defend the local and construct barriers to capital's accelerating flows. From this perspective, the real globalisation of capital and the constitution of Empire must be considered signs of dispossession and defeat.We maintain, however, that today this localist position, although we admire and respect the spirit of some of its proponents, is both false and damaging. It is false first of all because the problem is poorly posed. In many characterisations the problem rests on a false dichotomy between the global and the local, assuming that the global entails homogenisation and undifferentiated identity whereas the local preserves heterogeneity and difference. Often implicit in such arguments is the assumption that the differences of the local are in some sense natural or at least that their origin remains beyond question. Local differences pre-exist the present scene and must be defended or protected against the intrusion of globalisation. It should come as no surprise given such assumptions that many defences of the local adopt the terminology of traditional ecology or even identify this "local" political project with the defence of nature and bio-diversity. This view can easily devolve into a kind of primordialism that fixes and romanticises social relations and identities. What needs to be addressed, instead, is precisely the production of locality, that is, the social machines that create and recreate the identities and differences that are understood as the local. The differences of locality are no pre-existing nor natural but rather effects of a regime of production. Globality similarly should not be understood in terms of cultural, political, or economic homogeneisation. Globalisation, like localisation, should be understood instead as a regie of the production of identity and difference, or really of homogenisation and heterogenisation. The better framework, then, to designate the distinction between the global and the local might refer to different networks of flows and obstacles in which the local moment or perspective gives priority to the reterritorialising barriers and the global moment privileges the mobility of deterritorialising flows. It is false, in any case, to claim that we can (re)establish local identities that are in some sense outside and protected against the global flows of capital and Empire.The Leftist strategy of resistance to globalisation and defence of locality is also damaging because in many cases what appear as local identities are not autonomous nor self-determining but actually feed into and support the development of the capitalist imperial machine. The globalisation or deterritorialisation operated by the imperial machine is not in fact opposed to the localisation or reterritorialisation, but rather sets in play mobile and modulating circuits of differentiation and identification. The strategy of local resistance misidentifies and thus masks the enemy. We are by no means opposed to the globalisation of relationships as such - in fact, as we said, the strongest forces of Leftist internationalism have effectively led this process. The enemy, rather, is a specific regime of global relations that we call Empire. More importantly, this strategy of defending the local is damaging because it obscures and even negates the real alternatives and the potentials for liberation that exist within Empire. We should all be done once and for all with the search for an outside, a standpoint that imagines a purity for our politics. It is better both theoretically and practically to enter the terrain of Empire and confront its homogenising and heterogenising flows in all their complexity, grounding our analysis in the power of the global multitude.Refrains of the InternationaleThere was a time, not so long ago, when internationalism was a key component of proletarian struggles and progressive politics in general. "The proletariat has no country", or better, "the country of the proletariat is the entire world". The Internationale was the hymn of revolutionaries, the song of utopian futures. We should note that the utopia expressed in these slogans is in fact not really internationalist, if by internationalist we understand a kind of consensus among the various national identities that preserves their differences but negotiates some limited agreement. Rather, proletarian internationalism was anti-nationalist, and hence supranational and global. Workers of the world unite! - not on the basis of national identities but directly through common needs and desires, without regard to borders and boundaries.Internationalism was the will of an active mass subject that recognised that the nation states were the key agents of capitalist exploitation and that the multitude was continually drafted to fight their senseless wars - in short, that the nation state was a political form whose contradictions could not be subsumed and sublimated but only destroyed. International solidarity was really a project for the destruction of the nation state and the construction of a new global community. This proletarian program stood behind the often ambiguous tactical definitions that socialist and communist parties produced during the century of their hegemony over the proletariat. If the nation state was a central link in the chain of domination and thus had to be destroyed, then the national proletariat had as a primary task destroying itself insofar as it was defined by the nation and thus bringing international solidarity out of the prison in which it had been trapped. International solidarity had to be recognised not as an act of charity or altruism for the good of others, a noble sacrifice for another national working class, but rather as proper to and inseparable from each national proletariat's own desire and struggle for liberation. Proletarian internationalism constructed a paradoxical and powerful political machine that pushed continually beyond the boundaries and hierarchies of the nation states and posed utopian futures only on the global terrain.Today we should all clearly recognise that the time of such proletarian internationalism is over. That does not negate the fact, however, that the concept of internationalism really lived among the masses and deposited a kind of geological stratum of suffering and desire, a memory of victories and defeats, a residue of ideological tensions and needs. Furthermore the proletariat does in fact find itself today not just international but (at least tendentially) global. One might be tempted to say that proletarian internationalism actually "won" in the light of the facts that the powers of nation states have declined in the recent passage toward globalisation and Empire, but that would be a strange and ironic notion of victory. It is more accurate to say, following the William Morris quote that serves as one of the epigraphs for this book, that what they fought for came about despite their defeat, but then turned out to be not what they meant - and perhaps now we have to fight for what they meant under another name.The practice of proletarian internationalism was expressed most clearly in the international cycles of struggles. In this framework the (national) general strike and insurrection against the (nation-)state were only really conceivable as elements of communication among struggles and processes of liberation on the internationalist terrain. From Berlin to Moscow, from Paris to New Delhi, from Algiers to Hanoi, from Shanghai to Jakarta, from Havana to New York, struggles resonated with one another throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A cycle was constructed as news of a revolt was communicated and applied in each new context, just as in an earlier era merchant ships carried the news of slave revolt from island to island around the Caribbean, igniting a stubborn string of fires that could not be quenched. For a cycle to form the recipients of the news must be able to "translate" the events into their own language, recognise the struggles as their own and thus add a link to the chain. In some cases this "translation" is rather elaborate: the way in which Chinese intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century, for example heard of the anti-colonial struggles in the Philippines and Cuba and translated them into the terms of their own revolutionary projects. In other cases it is much more direct: how the factory council movement in Turin, Italy, was immediately inspired by the news of the Bolshevik victory in Russia. Rather than thinking of the struggles as relating to each other like links in a chain, it might be better to conceive of them as communicating like a virus that modulates its form to find in each context an adequate host.It would not be hard to map the periods of extreme intensity of these cycles. A first wave might be seen as beginning after 1848 with the political agitation of the First International, continuing in the 1880s and 1890s with the formation of socialist political and trade union organisations, and then rising to a peak after the Russian revolution of 1905 and the first international cycle of anti-imperialist struggles. A second wave arose after the Soviet revolution of 1917, which was followed by an international progression of struggles that could only be contained by fascisms on one side and reabsorbed by the New Deal and antifascist fronts on the other. And finally there was the wave of struggles that began with the Chinese revolution and proceeded through the African and Latin American liberation struggles to the explosions of the 1960s throughout the world.These international cycles of struggles were the real motor that determined the development of the institutions of capital and that drove it in a process of reform and restructuring. Proletarian, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist internationalism, the struggle for communism, which lived in all the most powerful insurrectional events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anticipated and prefigured the processes of the globalisation of capital and the formation of Empire in this way the formation of Empire is a response to proletarian internationalism. There is nothing dialectical nor teleological about this anticipation and prefiguration of capitalist development by the mass struggles. On the contrary, the struggles themselves a are demonstrations of the creativity of desire, utopias of lived experience, the workings of historicity as potentiality - in short, the struggles are the naked reality of the res gestae. A teleology of sorts is constructed only after the fact, post festum.The struggles that preceded and prefigured globalisation were expressions of the force of living labour, which sought to liberate itself from the rigid territorialising regimes imposed on it. As it contests the dead labour accumulated against it, living labour always seeks to break the fixed territorialising structures, the national organisations and the political figured that keep it prisoner. With the force of living labour, its restless activity and its deterritorialising desire, this process of rupture throws open all the windows of history. When one adopts the perspective of the activity of the multitude, its production of subjectivity and desire, one can recognise how globalisation, insofar as it operates a real deterritorialisation of the previous structures of exploitation and control, is really a condition of the liberation of the multitude. But how can this potential for liberation be realised today? Does that same uncontainable desire for freedom that broke and buried the nation state and that determined the transition toward Empire still live beneath the ashes of the present, the ashes of the fire that consumed the internationalist proletarian subject that was centred around the industrial working class? What has come to stand in the place of the subject? In what sense can we say that the ontological rooting of a new multitude has come to be a positive of alternative actor in the articulation of globalisation?The mole and the snakeWe need to recognise that the very subject of labour and revolt has changed profoundly. The composition of the proletariat has transformed and thus our understanding to it must too. In conceptual terms we understand proletariat as a broad category that includes all those whose labour is directly or indirectly exploited by and subjected to capitalist norms of production and reproduction. In a previous era the category of the proletarian centred around and was at times effectively subsumed under industrial working class, whose paradigmatic figure was the male mass factory worker. That industrial working class was often accorded the leafing role over other figures of labour (such as peasant labour and reproductive labour) in both economic analyses and political movements. Today that working class has all but disappeared from view. It has not ceased to exist, but it has been displaced from its privileged position in the capitalist economy and its hegemonic position in the class composition of the proletariat. The proletariat is not what it used to be, but that does not mean it has vanished. It means, rather, that we are faced once again with the analytical task of understanding the new composition of the proletariat as a class.The fact that under the category of proletariat we understand all those exploited by and subject to capitalist domination should not indicate that the proletariat is a homogeneous or undifferentiated unit - it is indeed cut through in various directions by differences and stratifications. Some labour is waged, some is not; some labour is limited to eight hours a day and forty hours a week, some expands to fill the entire time of life; some labour is accorded a minimal value, some is exalted to the pinnacle of the capitalist economy. We argue in our book that among the various figures of production active today the figure of immaterial labour-power (involved in communication, co-operation, and the production and reproduction of affects) occupies an increasingly central position in both the schema of capitalist production and the composition of the proletariat. Our point her is that all of these diverse forms of labour are in some way subject to capitalist discipline and capitalist relations of production. This fact of being within capital is what defines the proletariat as a class.In the second place we need to look more concretely at the form of the struggles in which this new proletariat expresses its desires and needs. In the second half of the twentieth century, and in particular in the two decades that stretched from 1968 to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the restructuring and global expansion of capitalist production have been accompanied by a transformation of proletarian struggles. As we said, the figure of an international cycle of struggles based on the communication and translation of the common desires of labour in revolt seems no longer to exist. The fact that the cycle as the specific form of the assemblage of struggles has vanished, however, does not simply open up to an abyss. On the contrary, we can recognise powerful events on the world scene that reveal the trace of the multitude's refusal of exploitation and that signal a new kind of proletarian solidarity and militancy.Consider the most radical and powerful struggles of the final years of the twentieth century: the Tiananmen Square events in 1989, the Intifada against Israeli State authority, the May 1992 revolt in Los Angeles, the uprising in Chiapas that began in 1994, the series of strikes that paralysed France in December 1995 and those that crippled South Korea in 1996. Each of these struggles was specific and based on immediate regional concerns in such a way that they could in no way be linked together as a globally expanding chin of revolt. None of these events inspired a cycle of struggles because the desires and needs they expressed could not be translated into different contexts. In other words, (potential) revolutionaries in other parts of the world did not hear of the events in Beijing, Nablus, Los Angeles, Chiapas, Paris, or Seoul and immediately recognise them as their own struggles. Furthermore, these struggles not only fail to communicate to other contexts, but they lack even a local communication and thus often have a very brief duration where they are born, burning out in a flash. This is certainly one of the central and most urgent political paradoxes of our time: In our much celebrated age of communication, struggels have become all but incommunicable.This paradox of incommunicability makes it extremely difficult to grasp and express the new power posed by the struggles that have emerged. We ought to be able to recognise that what the struggles have lost in extension, duration and communicability they have gained in intensity. We ought to be able to recognise that although all of these struggles focused on their own local and immediate circumstances, they all nonetheless posed problems of supranational relevance, problems that are proper to the new figure of imperial capitalist regulation. In Los Angeles, for example, the riots were fuelled by local racial antagonisms and patterns of social and economic exclusion that are in many respects particular to that (post)urban territory, but the events were also immediately catapulted to a general level insofar as they expressed a refusal of the post-Fordist regime of social control. Like the Intifada in certain respects, the Los Angeles riots demonstrated how the decline of Fordist bargaining regimes and mechanisms of social mediation has made the management of racially and socially diverse metropolitan territories and populations so precarious. The looting of commodities and burning of property were not just metaphors but the real global condition of the mobility and volatility of post-Fordist social mediations. In Chiapas, too, the insurrection focused primarily on local concerns: problems of exclusion and lack of representation specific to Mexican society and the Mexican State, which have also to a limited degree long been common to the racial hierarchies throughout much of Latin America. The Zapatista rebellion, however, was also immediately a struggle against the social regime imposed by NAFTA and more generally the systematic exclusion and subordination in the regional construction of the world market. Finally, like those in Seoul, the massive strikes in Paris and throughout France in later 1995 were aimed at specific local and national labour issue (such as pensions, wages and unemployment), but the struggle was also immediately recognised as a clear contestation of the new social and economic construction of Europe. The French strikes called above all for a new notion of the public, a new construction of public space against the neo-liberal mechanisms of privatisation that accompany more or less everywhere the project of capitalist globalisation. Perhaps precisely because all there struggles are incommunicable and thus blocked from travelling horizontally in the form of a cycle, they are forced rather to leap vertically and touch immediately on the global level.We ought to be able to recognise that this is not the appearance of a new cycle of internationalist struggles, but rather the emergence of a new quality of social movements. We ought to be able to recognise, in other words, the fundamentally new characteristics these struggles all present, despite their radical diversity. First, each struggle, although firmly rooted in local conditions, leaps immediately to the global level and attacks the imperial constitution in its generality. Second, all the struggles destroy the traditional distinction between economic and political struggles. The struggles are at once economic, political and cultural - and hence they are biopolitical struggles, struggles over the form of life. They are constituent struggles, creating one public spaces and new forms of community.We ought to be able to recognise all this, but it is not all that easy. We must admit, in fact, that even when trying to individuate the real novelty of these situations we are hampered by the nagging impression that these struggles are always already old, outdated and anachronistic. The struggles at Tiananmen Square spoke a language of democracy that seemed long out of fashion; the guitars, headbands, tent and slogans all looked like a weak echo of Berkeley in the 60s. The Los Angeles riots, too, seemed like an aftershock of the earthquake of racial conflicts that shook the United States in the 1960s. The strikes in Paris and Seoul seemed to take us back to the era of the mass factory worker, as if they were the last gasp of a dying working class. All these struggles, which pose really new elements, appear form the beginning to be already old and outdated - precisely we because they cannot communicate, because their languages cannot be translated. The struggle do no communicate despite their being hyper-mediatised, on television, the Internet and every other imaginable forum. Once again we are confronted by the paradox of incommunicability.We can certainly recognise real obstacles that block the communication of struggles. One such obstacle is the absence of a recognition of a common enemy against which the struggles are directed. Beijing, Los Angeles, Nablus, Chiapas, Paris, Seoul: The situations seem all utterly particular, but in fact they all directly attack the global order of Empire and seek a real alternative. Clarifying the nature of the common enemy is thus an essential political task. A second obstacle, which is really corollary to the first, is that there is no common language of struggles that could "translate" the particular language of each into a cosmopolitan language. struggles in other parts of the world and even our own struggles seem to be written in an incomprehensible foreign language. This too points toward an important political task: to construct a new common language that facilitates communication, like the languages of anti-imperialism and proletarian internationalism did for the struggles of a previous era. Perhaps this needs to be a new type of communication that functions not on the basis of resemblances but on the basis of differences: a communication of singularities.Recognising a common enemy and inventing a common language of struggles is certainly important political tasks and we will advance them as far as we can in the course of the book, but our intuition tells us that this line of analysis fails to grasp the real potential presented by the new struggles. Our intuition tells us, in other words, that the model of the horizontal articulation of struggles in a cycle is no longer adequate to recognise the way in which contemporary struggles achieve global significance. Such a model in fact blinds us to their real new potential.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!"[2] Well, we suspect that Marx's old mole has finally died. It seems to us, in fact, that in the contemporary passage to Empire the structured tunnels of the mole have been replaced by the infinite undulations of the snake. This is the image that Deleuze gives in his analysis of the passage from disciplinary societies to societies of control. (Deleuze claims that contemporary society had gone beyond the disciplinary forms that Foucault analysed. Today the disciplinary institutions, the school the family, the prison, the factory, are all in crisis. This doesn't mean that disciplinary logics are breaking down; what is breaking down rather are the institutional boundaries that once defined and limited their application to one social space. The disciplinary logics spread out across society, they are generalised and in some respects intensified. The generalised disciplinarity is what defines the society of control.) "The old mole", Deleuze writes, "is the animal of closed environments, but the snake is the animal of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to another, from the more to the snake, in the regime we live under, but also in out way of living and our relations with others." The depths of the modern world and its subterranean passageways have in postmodernity all become superficial. Today's struggles slither silently across the superficial, imperial landscapes. Perhaps the incommunicability of struggles, the lack of well-structured, communicating tunnels, is in fact a strength rather than a weakness - a strength because all of the movements are immediately subversive in themselves and so not wait on any sort of external aid or extension to guarantee their effectiveness. Perhaps the more capital extends its global network of production and control, the more powerful any singular point of revolt can be simply by focusing their own powers, concentrating their energies in a tense and compact coil, these serpentine struggles striking directly at the highest articulations of imperial order. Empire presents a superficial world, the virtual centre of which can be accessed immediately from any point across the surface. If these points were to constitute something like a new cycle of struggles it would be a cycle defined not by the communicative extension of the struggles but rather by their singular emergence, by the intensity that characterises them one by one. In short, this new phase is defined by the fact that these struggles do not link horizontally but each leap vertically, directly to the virtual centre of Empire.[3] From the point of view of the revolutionary tradition, one might object that the tactical successes of revolutionary actions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were all characterised precisely by the capacity to blast open the weakest link of the imperialist chain, that this is the ABC of revolutionary dialectics, and thus it would seem today that the situation is not very promising. 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 organisation, 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. To achieve significance, every struggle must attack at the heart of the Empire, at its strength. That fact, however, does not give priority to any geographical regions, as if only social movements in Washington, Geneva or Tokyo could attack the heart of Empire. On the contrary, the construction of Empire and the globalisation of economic and cultural relationships means that the critical centre of Empire can be attacked from any angle. The tactical preoccupations of the old revolutionary school are thus completely irretrievable; the only strategy available to the struggles is that of a constituent counter-power that emerges from within Empire.Those who have difficulty accepting the novelty and revolutionary potential of this situation from the perspective of the struggles themselves might recognise it more easily from the perspective of imperial power, which is constrained to react to the struggles. Even when these struggles become sites effectively closed to communication, they are at the same time the maniacal focus of the critical attention of Empire. They are educational lessons in the classroom of administration and the chambers of government - lessons that demand repressive instruments. The primary lesson is that such events cannot be repeated if the processes of capitalist globalisation are to continue. These struggles, however, have their own weight, their own specific intensity, and moreover they are immanent to the procedures and developments of imperial power. They invest and sustain the processes of globalisation themselves. 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 globalisation are possible and which are not. In this contradictory and paradoxical way, the imperial processes of globalisation assume these events, recognising them as both limits and opportunities to recalibrate Empire's own instruments. The processes of globalisation 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.Methodology againReturning to the methodological or axiomatic point we spoke of at the beginning, one can see how this argument about international cycles of struggles and capitalist globalisation is based on the fundamental axiom: that resistance comes before power (in Deleuze/Foucault terms) or that proletarian struggles precede and prefigure the successive forms of capitalist society and rule (in Marxist/operaismo terms).Now, it is perfectly reasonably to ask if it is in fact true that resistance comes before power and that social struggle precede and prefigure capitalist restructuration. We have not offered an argument for it, really - precisely, we have treated it as an axiom. Our book tries to demonstrate that it is plausible to read the history from below, but that is really not a proof. What is more interesting, though, is the political effect of this axiom, that it highlights the power of resistance and the power of social struggles.Today, when facing the forces of capitalist globalisation and our new world order, it is all too easy and all too common to feel ourselves and our social movements powerless. This method can work as a kind of antidote to that cynicism and sense of powerlessness. It is not a matter of pretending that we are powerful when we are not, but rather recognising the power we really have; the power that created the contemporary world and can create another.This text is based on a paper that Michael Hardt presented at SUNY, Buffalo in February 1999. The point of departure is a chapter in Hardt's and Negri's bookEmpire (Harvard University Press 2000).Notes[1] Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Harvard University Press 2000 (available in the libcom.org library here)
[2] Karl Marx, , New York; International Publishers 1963
[3] See Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control” trans. Martin Joughin, New York. Columbia University Press 1995 pp.177-182 (available in the libcom.org library here).