Declaration: Hardt & Negri

This is not a mani­festo. Mani­fes­tos provide a glimpse of a world to come and also call into being the sub­ject, who although now only a specter must mater­i­al­ize to become the agent of change. Mani­fes­tos work like the ancient proph­ets, who by the power of their vis­ion cre­ate their own people. Today’s social move­ments have reversed the order, mak­ing mani­fes­tos and proph­ets obsol­ete. Agents of change have already des­cen­ded into the streets and occu­pied city squares, not only threat­en­ing and top­pling rulers but also con­jur­ing vis­ions of a new world. More import­ant, per­haps, the mul­ti­tudes, through their logics and prac­tices, their slo­gans and desires, have declared a new set of prin­ciples and truths. How can their declar­a­tion become the basis for con­sti­tut­ing a new and sus­tain­able soci­ety? How can those prin­ciples and truths guide us in rein­vent­ing how we relate to each other and our world? In their rebel­lion, the mul­ti­tudes must dis­cover the pas­sage from declar­a­tion to constitution.

Early in 2011, in the depths of social and eco­nomic crises char­ac­ter­ized by rad­ical inequal­ity, com­mon sense seemed to dic­tate that we trust the decisions and guid­ance of the rul­ing powers, lest even greater dis­asters befall us. The fin­an­cial and gov­ern­mental rulers may be tyr­ants, and they may have been primar­ily respons­ible for cre­at­ing the crises, but we had no choice. Dur­ing the course of 2011, how­ever, a series of social struggles shattered that com­mon sense and began to con­struct a new one. Occupy Wall Street was the most vis­ible but was only one moment in a cycle of struggles that shif­ted the ter­rain of polit­ical debate and opened new pos­sib­il­it­ies for polit­ical action over the course of the year.

Two thou­sand eleven began early. On 17 Decem­ber 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, twenty-​six-​year-​old street vendor Mohamed Bou­azizi, who was repor­ted to have earned a com­puter sci­ence degree, set him­self on fire. By the end of the month, mass revolts had spread to Tunis with the demand, “Ben Ali dégage!” and indeed by the middle of Janu­ary, Zine el-​Abidine Ben Ali was already gone. Egyp­tians took up the baton and, with tens and hun­dreds of thou­sands reg­u­larly com­ing out in the streets start­ing in late Janu­ary, deman­ded that Hosni Mubarak go too. Cairo’s Tahrir Square was occu­pied for a mere eight­een days before Mubarak departed.

Protests against repress­ive regimes spread quickly to other coun­tries in North Africa and the Middle East, includ­ing Bahrain and Yemen and even­tu­ally Libya and Syria, but the ini­tial spark in Tunisia and Egypt also caught fire farther away. The pro­test­ers occupy­ing the Wis­con­sin state­house in Feb­ru­ary and March expressed solid­ar­ity and recog­nized res­on­ance with their coun­ter­parts in Cairo, but the cru­cial step began on 15 May in the occu­pa­tions of cent­ral squares in Mad­rid and Bar­celona by the so-​called indig­na­dos. The Span­ish encamp­ments took inspir­a­tion from the Tunisian and Egyp­tian revolts and car­ried for­ward their struggles in new ways. Against the socialist-​led gov­ern­ment of José Luis Rodríguez Zapa­tero, they deman­ded, “Demo­cra­cia real ya,” refus­ing the rep­res­ent­a­tion of all polit­ical parties, and they for­war­ded a wide range of social protests, from the cor­rup­tion of the banks to unem­ploy­ment, from the lack of social ser­vices to insuf­fi­cient hous­ing and the injustice of evic­tions. Mil­lions of Span­iards par­ti­cip­ated in the move­ment, and the vast major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion sup­por­ted their demands. In occu­pied squares the indig­na­dos formed assem­blies for decision-​making and invest­ig­at­ive com­mis­sions to explore a range of social issues.

Even before the encamp­ments in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol were dis­mantled in June, the Greeks had taken up the baton from the indig­na­dos and occu­pied Syn­tagma Square in Athens to protest against aus­ter­ity meas­ures. Not long after, tents sprang up on Tel Aviv’s Roth­schild Boulevard to demand social justice and wel­fare for Israelis. In early August, after police shot a black Bri­ton, riots broke out in Tot­ten­ham and spread through­out England.

When a few hun­dred pion­eer occu­pi­ers brought their tents to New York’s Zuc­cotti Park on 17 Septem­ber, then, it was their turn to take up the baton. And indeed their actions and the spread of the move­ments in the United States and across the world have to be under­stood with the year’s exper­i­ences at their backs.

Many who are not part of the struggles have trouble see­ing the con­nec­tions in this list of events. The North African rebel­lions opposed repress­ive regimes and their demands centered on the removal of tyr­ants, whereas the wide-​ranging social demands of the encamp­ments in Europe, the United States, and Israel addressed rep­res­ent­at­ive con­sti­tu­tional sys­tems. Fur­ther­more, the Israeli tent protest (don’t call it an occu­pa­tion!) del­ic­ately bal­anced demands so as to remain silent about ques­tions of set­tle­ments and Palestinian rights; the Greeks are facing sov­er­eign debt and aus­ter­ity meas­ures of his­toric pro­por­tions; and the indig­na­tion of the Brit­ish rioters addressed a long his­tory of racial hier­archy — and they didn’t even pitch tents.

Each of these struggles is sin­gu­lar and ori­ented toward spe­cific local con­di­tions. The first thing to notice, though, is that they did, in fact, speak to one another. The Egyp­tians, of course, clearly moved down paths traveled by the Tunisi­ans and adop­ted their slo­gans, but the occu­pi­ers of Puerta del Sol also thought of their struggle as car­ry­ing on the exper­i­ences of those at Tahrir. In turn, the eyes of those in Athens and Tel Aviv were focused on the exper­i­ences of Mad­rid and Cairo. The Wall Street occu­pi­ers had them all in view, trans­lat­ing, for instance, the struggle against the tyr­ant into a struggle against the tyranny of fin­ance. You may think that they were just deluded and for­got or ignored the dif­fer­ences in their situ­ations and demands. We believe, how­ever, that they have a clearer vis­ion than those out­side the struggle, and they can hold together without con­tra­dic­tion their sin­gu­lar con­di­tions and local battles with the com­mon global struggle.

Ralph Ellison’s invis­ible man, after an ardu­ous jour­ney through a racist society,developed the abil­ity to com­mu­nic­ate with oth­ers in struggle. “Who knows,” Ellison’s nar­rator con­cludes, “but that, on the lower fre­quen­cies, I speak for you?” Today, too, those in struggle com­mu­nic­ate on the lower fre­quen­cies, but, unlike in Ellison’s time, no one speaks for them. The lower fre­quen­cies are open air­waves for all. And some mes­sages can be heard only by those in struggle.

These move­ments do, of course, share a series of char­ac­ter­ist­ics, the most obvi­ous of which is the strategy of encamp­ment or occu­pa­tion. A dec­ade ago the alter­g­lob­al­iz­a­tion move­ments were nomadic. They migrated from one sum­mit meet­ing to the next, illu­min­at­ing the injustices and anti­demo­cratic nature of a series of key insti­tu­tions of the global power sys­tem: the World Trade Organ­iz­a­tion, the Inter­na­tional Mon­et­ary Fund, the World Bank, and the G8 national lead­ers, among oth­ers. The cycle of struggles that began in 2011, in con­trast, is sedent­ary. Instead of roam­ing accord­ing to the cal­en­dar of the sum­mit meet­ings, these move­ments stay put and, in fact, refuse to move. Their immob­il­ity is partly due to the fact that they are so deeply rooted in local and national social issues.

The move­ments also share their internal organ­iz­a­tion as a mul­ti­tude. The for­eign press corps searched des­per­ately in Tunisia and Egypt for a leader of the move­ments. Dur­ing the most intense period of the Tahrir Square occu­pa­tion, for example, they would each day pre­sume a dif­fer­ent fig­ure was the real leader: one day it was Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize win­ner, the next day Google exec­ut­ive Wael Ghonim, and so forth. What the media couldn’t under­stand or accept was that there was no leader in Tahrir Square. The move­ments’ refusal to have a leader was recog­niz­able through­out the year but per­haps was most pro­nounced in Wall Street. A series of intel­lec­tu­als and celebrit­ies made appear­ances at Zuc­cotti Park, but no one could con­sider any of them lead­ers; they were guests of the mul­ti­tude. From Cairo and Mad­rid to Athens and New York, the move­ments instead developed hori­zontal mech­an­isms for organ­iz­a­tion. They didn’t build headquar­ters or form cent­ral com­mit­tees but spread out like swarms, and most import­ant, they cre­ated demo­cratic prac­tices of decision mak­ing so that all par­ti­cipants could lead together.

A third char­ac­ter­istic that the move­ments exhibit, albeit in dif­fer­ent ways, is what we con­ceive as a struggle for the com­mon. In some cases this has been expressed in flames. When Mohamed Bou­azizi set him­self on fire, his protest was under­stood to be against not only the abuse he suffered at the hands of the local police but also the widely shared social and eco­nomic plight of work­ers in the coun­try, many of whom are unable to find work adequate to their edu­ca­tion. Indeed in both Tunisia and Egypt the loud calls to remove the tyr­ant made many observ­ers deaf to the pro­found social and eco­nomic issues at stake in the move­ments, as well as the cru­cial actions of the trade uni­ons. The August fires of riot­ing in Lon­don also expressed protest against the cur­rent eco­nomic and social order. Like the Parisian rioters in 2005 and those in Los Angeles more than a dec­ade before, the indig­na­tion of Bri­tons respon­ded to a com­plex set of social issues, the most cent­ral of which is racial sub­or­din­a­tion. But the burn­ing and loot­ing in each of these cases also responds to the power of com­mod­it­ies and the rule of prop­erty, which are them­selves, of course, often vehicles of racial sub­or­din­a­tion. These are struggles for the com­mon, then, in the sense that they con­test the injustices of neo­lib­er­al­ism and, ulti­mately, the rule of private prop­erty. But that does not make them social­ist. In fact, we see very little of tra­di­tional social­ist move­ments in this cycle of struggles. And as much as struggles for the com­mon con­test the rule of private prop­erty, they equally oppose the rule of pub­lic prop­erty and the con­trol of the state.

In this pamph­let we aim to address the desires and accom­plish­ments of the cycle of struggles that erup­ted in 2011, but we do so not by ana­lyz­ing them dir­ectly. Instead we begin by invest­ig­at­ing the gen­eral social and polit­ical con­di­tions in which they arise. Our point of attack here is the dom­in­ant forms of sub­jectiv­ity pro­duced in the con­text of the cur­rent social and polit­ical crisis. We engage four primary sub­ject­ive fig­ures — the indebted, the medi­at­ized, the secur­it­ized, and the rep­res­en­ted — all of which are impov­er­ished and their powers for social action are masked or mystified.

Move­ments of revolt and rebel­lion, we find, provide us the means not only to refuse the repress­ive regimes under which these sub­ject­ive fig­ures suf­fer but also to invert these sub­jectiv­it­ies in fig­ures of power. They dis­cover, in other words, new forms of inde­pend­ence and secur­ity on eco­nomic as well as social and com­mu­nic­a­tional ter­rains, which together cre­ate the poten­tial to throw off sys­tems of polit­ical rep­res­ent­a­tion and assert their own powers of demo­cratic action. These are some of the accom­plish­ments that the move­ments have already real­ized and can develop further.

To con­sol­id­ate and heighten the powers of such sub­jectiv­it­ies, though, another step is needed. The move­ments, in effect, already provide a series of con­sti­tu­tional prin­ciples that can be the basis for a con­stitu­ent pro­cess. One of the most rad­ical and far-​reaching ele­ments of this cycle of move­ments, for example, has been the rejec­tion of rep­res­ent­a­tion and the con­struc­tion instead of schemas of demo­cratic par­ti­cip­a­tion. These move­ments also give new mean­ings to free­dom, our rela­tion to the com­mon, and a series of cent­ral polit­ical arrange­ments, which far exceed the bounds of the cur­rent repub­lican con­sti­tu­tions. These mean­ings are now already becom­ing part of a new com­mon sense. They are found­a­tional prin­ciples that we already take to be inali­en­able rights, like those that were her­al­ded in the course of the eighteenth-​century revolutions.

The task is not to codify new social rela­tions in a fixed order, but instead to cre­ate a con­stitu­ent pro­cess that organ­izes those rela­tions and makes them last­ing while also fos­ter­ing future innov­a­tions and remain­ing open to the desires of the mul­ti­tude. The move­ments have declared a new inde­pend­ence, and a con­stitu­ent power must carry that forward.

From hardtnegri​de​clar​a​tion​.com

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