Empire by Antonio Negri, Professor Michael Hardt Page A

each
    struggle, though firmly rooted in local conditions, leaps immediately
    to the global level and attacks the imperial constitution in its general-
    ity. Second, all the struggles destroy the traditional distinction be-
    tween 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 strug-
    gles, creating new public spaces and new forms of community.
    We ought to be able to recognize all this, but it is not that
    easy. We must admit, in fact, that even when trying to individuate
    the real novelty ofthese 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    impression that these struggles are always already old, outdated, and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
    ofdemocracy that seemed long out offashion; the guitars, head-
    bands, tents, and slogans all looked like a weak echo ofBerkeley
    in the 1960s. The Los Angeles riots, too, seemed like an aftershock
    ofthe earthquake ofracial conflicts that shook the United States
    in the 1960s. The strikes in Paris and Seoul seemed to take us back
    to the era ofthe mass factory worker, as ifthey were the last gasp
    ofa dying working class. All these struggles, which pose really
    new elements, appear from the beginning to be already old and
    outdated—precisely because they cannot communicate, because
    their languages cannot be translated. The struggles do not communi-
    cate despite their being hypermediatized, on television, the Internet,
    and every other imaginable medium. Once again we are confronted
    by the paradox ofincommunicability.
    We can certainly recognize real obstacles that block the com-
    munication ofstruggles. One such obstacle is the absence ofa
    recognition ofa common enemy against which the struggles are
    directed. Beijing, Los Angeles, Nablus, Chiapas, Paris, Seoul: the
    situations all seem utterly particular, but in fact they all directly attack A L T E R N A T I V E S W I T H I N E M P I R E
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    the global order ofEmpire and seek a real alternative. Clarifying the
    nature ofthe 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 ofstruggles that could ‘‘translate’’ the partic-
    ular language ofeach into a cosmopolitan language. Struggles in
    other parts ofthe 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, as the languages of anti-
    imperialism and proletarian internationalism did for the struggles
    ofa previous era. Perhaps this needs to be a new type ofcommunica-
    tion that functions not on the basis of resemblances but on the basis
    of differences: a communication of singularities.
    Recognizing a common enemy and inventing a common
    language ofstruggles are certainly important political tasks, and we
    will advance them as far as we can in this book, but our intuition
    tells us that this line ofanalysis finally fails to grasp the real potential presented by the new struggles. Our intuition tells us, in other
    words, that the model ofthe horizontal articulation ofstruggles in
    a cycle is no longer adequate for recognizing 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 ofthe cycle ofprole-
    tarian struggles that were emerging in nineteenth-century Europe
    in terms ofa 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