Radio Warsaw 1.
1.1. Genoa was Warsaw. The Empire chose the road of coup d'état, because it has not been able to enact a global constitution and to regulate the markets with its institutions that are establishing. The opportunities of mediation were crushed, and it's no use to live in the delusion that it was solely a question of a single fascist government and its conducts. On the contrary, this situation has been produced by the best experts which the Empire has in controlling and suppressing social movements. So many details link Quebec City, Gothenburg and Genoa together. All this is connected to an authoritarian phase, whose realization has been decided by the powerful cluster, which is producing and using military technologies of destruction in the United States. We can verify this without collapsing into a comfortable paranoia or tempting conspiracy theories.
1.2. Talking about an authoritarian phase in a society of control may sound paradoxical. If the free expression of subjectivity is the precondition of capitalist accumulation, why is this same subjectivity brutally repressed? Apparently a certain critical point has been reached. At the same time it must be added, that the strategy of the Empire not based solely on police activity and on refusal of rights, but that it is based on diverse technologies of control: from media control to the dominance of everyday life, from loss of economic security to the distribution of illusions of social success. Nevertheless it is reasonable to say that the refusal of constitutional rights and police activity have the most central position. We are dealing with biopower, which can change into the power of death anytime. This explains the contradiction which we have witnessed recently: what prevails between the moments of dialogue/mediation and repression/murder. In the postmodern society the control tries to become invisible, nontouchable and to make productive freedom possible. However, this can be crushed the moment a critical point of rupture has been reached. When the movements of social co-operation and multitude begin to escape imperial control, violent repression enters into the stage. During "the blue moment" when the relative freedom, realized in the range of control, is becoming an exodus outside of the system, to a real constitutive deterritorialization. Therefore there is no reason to be amazed, why the Empire's violent procedures of repression were mostly centered on the peaceful multitude in Genoa and Gothenburg. This was the actual object of violence.
1.3. The authoritarian phase is following the tactic of coup d'état. When freedom increases and accumulates, when the signs of exodus can be seen in the horizon, suddenly the national constitutions are not valid anymore. What makes this situation paradoxical is the fact that at the same time as the Empire is unable to write its own formal, global constitution, it is forced to temporarily suspend constitutions valid on the national level or to temporarily suspend international agreements. In practice this means that on the moment of repression no constitution is valid. It means that Empire is based on no constitution. It is power in the cleanest form. It is postmodern fascism (without this term needing to offend any- one). The tendency is completely exposed, when we think about the coup d'état during the presidential election in the United States realized by Bush and the military-productional cluster. As the results of this coup d'état, now a missile shield is being built, and there are appeals for nuclear power and sales of consultation services during top summits for the police forces of the imperial provinces.
2. 2.1. The fighting cycle which began in Seattle has been able to completely delegitimate the effort to establish institutions, which were supposed to govern the global market. This has forced the Empire to resort to the use of force instead of looking for legitimization. The reasons for the success of the Seattle movement are in its ability to foresee Empire on the level of globalization and especially in its ability to recognize certain institutions as strategic in the process of global governability. All this even before Empire itself has understood, that it was maybe possible to govern the markets with the organs created in Bretton Woods or during the years of the oil crisis.
2.2. The movement of multitude, which has expressed itself during the previous twenty months, has also explicitly pointed where its own shortcomings are. It has mostly attacked politically the imperial institutions, but it has not been able to bring the forces of social and productive co-operation into the range of the struggle. Because of this, the movement has been continually forced to expand its supporting base with the methods of mediation. New subjects have been included by sloping the themes. For these reasons the movement has been forced to lean on spectacle and such communication techniques which have been easily appropriated by the Empire. From a tactical point of view the choice of visibility has been intelligent, but it should have been supported by a stronger contribution to the themes of social production.
2.3. At the moment it looks like the movement is giving itself permanent structures in the form of Social Forums. These are some kind of co-ordination circles between different groups. In the Social Forums there is included a danger that the forces directed towards it will fight each other for hegemony or for homogeneous action methods and that they are not ready to encounter the new situation in which everything should be started from the beginning. In addition to this, the mainstreaming of the Social Forums is driving away the new and young subjectivities which have been the most central motor of the fighting cycle. We have also reason to ask if the Social Forums are able to represent the richness of the productive multitude, its diversity and its subversivity by placing themselves inside the fabrics of metropolitan production.
2.4. Genoa was a point of rupture because the multitude surprised everyone. The mobilization ability of the forces of social co-operation was a surprise. The surprise was even bigger, because we know, that these were just the first groping steps of an infant. However, there was something in the air which made us feel what it could be like: beautiful and terrifying. Genoa was like Warsaw and Dresden, the beginnings of revolutions which were able to destroy the horrors of socialism. Dozens and dozens of thousands of people on the streets without a large party or a large trade union. The entrance of a new way of decisionmaking, a way which is neither predetermined nor determined from above and which is not based the memory of the movements, but a decisionmaking which is realized in the actual event, in the moment when the event projects the multitude into a possible future. Direct democracy without representation. Subjectivity in the best meaning of the word. Genoa ridiculed and made completely inefficient all the logics, which we were used to, and which we thought would be adequate to postmodernity: from blocs of different colors to Social Forums. The traditions' and orthodoxies' structural inability to understand what was happening is nearly too obvious to be even mentioned. If in Genoa the multitude placed in crisis all the action models, which we thought would be on the conflictual level (from spectacular civil disobedience to pacifist carnivals), how can some people believe that the solutions of some 19th century quacks could be actual? When the productive multitude enters the field everything must change.
2.5. Genoa and Gothenburg also brought forward the element, which should have been evident for a long time. The hegemonic one concerning the forms of conflict is the one who uses force. It's useless to deny this. The one who is prepared to use force and who used it, defined the course of the events. The old Leninist truth. However, from a technical and political point of view the use of force was a loosing option. It was defeating because it was not able to decrease the slaughtering of the demonstrators, which of course would have been realized anyway, not depending on whether the demonstrators had used force or not. Therefore the use of force was not based on the Leninist logic of hegemony - a logic which is strange to us but whose efficiency is factual - but on a complete disorder, whose effects were heavy to everyone. Violence was a defeat also politically because it opened contradictions and denouncements, and because it wasn't able to encircle the movement around the proposed action pattern. However, this does not mean that the problem concerning the self- defense of the multitude has been solved. Maybe it's more actual than ever. We should understand which are the forms of self-defense that everyone shares and uses in order to defend the multitude, however without once again going into the mediation between different groups, in which methods and symbols are exchanged like fish in the market by escaping both Leninist hegemony and anarchist chaos.
3. 3.1. The suggestion of returning to the factory may sound like a leap backwards. But it is not a such thing, if we use the concept to mean the fabric of immaterial production in metropolis as a whole. The suggestion may give the impression of being a leap backwards, but in reality it is a moving forward of a remarkable quality. The movement has gone forward until now without posing the question on how it is possible to break the capitalist ability to always appropriate the knots of social co-operation and to control the production of value. Once the forces of social production and co-operation have shyly appeared inside the movement, the repression has been merciless and it has tried to completely destroy the possibilities of the productive multitude to express itself in the terms of political decisionmaking. Not later than now we should start using the results of the research, which has identified the general loss of security of the metropolitan proletariat as the most important means of social and productive control in the imperial era. The indication which comes up on the basis of the questions presented here, is the immediate placing of the forms of work and neoliberalist loss of security and the research concerning guaranteed income in the central point of theory and action.
4. 4.1. In the United States the coup d'état has already been realized. Europe will - nevertheless - stay as an open field, on which to make an offensive in order to create new political space. Europe will be the initial level for the multitude's activity. Maybe also this seems like a step backwards. Why should a movement, which we define as global, close itself into a restricted space? The question is not if we believe Europe or not, if we believe in the global dimension of the movements or if we want to place ourselves behind the options of Fischer and Chirac. The question is about recognizing a constitutive space for the multitude's material activity. Even now there is a vacuum of power in Europe, a constitutional void, and there are profound contradictions, which stretch all over the institutional world. Especially because of this Europe can be a speedwheel for the offensive against the imperial power, without digging up outdated theories about chains and weak links. This is the reason why foreseeing the Empire in the field of defining the European political space is principally important. It's as important as the already discussed ability to foresee the Empire in the tendency in which it is formalizing the institutions whose function would have been to guarantee the governability of the global market. In other words, Europe as a minimum space in which to develop social struggles for guaranteed income and in which to realize metropolitan research.
5. 5.1. The return to the themes of research, work, livelihood and metropolitan areas does not mean retreating from the offensive against the imperial institutions. However, we must understand that we are dealing with an end of a certain cycle. We are left with a strong extension to the direction of subjectivities of political organizations, non-governmental civil organizations, voluntary work and certain syndicalist organizations. What we lack today is a rooting strong enough to the areas of the productive metropolitan proletariat. This is the first knot to be opened, the first priority which needs to be answered by turning towards the European research of work and the struggle for guaranteed income. The second priority is included in the first. The return to the themes of work and guaranteed income cannot happen within the borders of national states anymore, but solely on a European level by following the productive chaining. This is nothing else than a suggestion to begin a research and struggle for livelihood in Europe. The third priority is connected to the strategies of coup d'état and the imperial development into the direction of increasing militarization. In this third area it is important to put into the field the forces which we have.
5.2. To these three priorities (work/livelihood, European political space and resistance against coup d'état and the militarization of production) it is possible to give a sufficient answer only by posing the question of organizing the multitude at the same time, of course not by prioritizing it to the content of the struggles, and by remembering firstly that today there is no suggestion of party on the agenda. Just a need to thinly connect parts into each other. If we pay attention to the complexity of the themes and the extensiveness of the areas it is evident that the organizational question cannot be evaded anymore. We should discuss about all this.
finlandia@ecn.org
