Communism as entrepreneurship

Da Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris Empire appeared in 2000, it caused a veritable earthquake. Of course, there had been countless critical analyzes of historical development following the fall of the Berlin Wall, but none of them had effectively managed to challenge neoliberalism, which Perry Anderson called "the most successful ideology of world history" that year. 1989 had never been the release many Marxists had hoped for. The fall of the wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union was not an opening, but an end. Instead of rethinking and updating Marx's critique of capitalist economics and communism's revolutionary project, the 1990s stood in the sign of capitalist globalization.

Fukuyama's description of the West's liberal market democracy as "the end of history" was just one expression of the period's excessive confidence in capital's ability to self-reform. The abandoning of Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm The Age of Extremes was another. Then Empire appeared and not only presented an analysis of this new globalized world as a capitalist empire, but also argued for the emergence of a new, collective and heterogeneous revolutionary subject that threatened this world from within, something happened. All the debilitating decay stories were suddenly transformed and replaced by a tale of new possibilities, of a potentially revolutionary and transcendent crowd that was already destroying capital from the inside.

The transition from economy to politics is waiting, due to the inability of the protest movement to political organization.

New synthesis. The collaboration between the young American professor of literature Hardt and the old Italian professor and activist Negri was a compelling attempt to launch a contemporary materialist economics criticism. Their critical analysis of changes in the relationship between capital and labor presented a new subject that was to overturn the empire and unlock the potentials of cognitive capitalism. Empire was since followed up by the books crowd from 2004, Commonwealth from 2009 and the little pamphlet book Declaration from 2012. The last was a quick analysis of the new space occupation movements that Hardt and Negri analyzed as rejections of what they called "the four neoliberal subjectivities": the indebted subject, it represented subject, it media account subject and that secured subject. Assembly constitutes a continuation of the small book, but now in the form of a new, great synthesis, where they take stock of the new wave of protest that saw the light of day after 2008, in the wake of the financial crisis, and spread from southern Europe to North Africa, on to Greece (2008 – 12), the Green Revolution in Iran (2009), the Arab Spring, the indignities in Spain, riots in London (2011), the student protests in Chile (2011 – 12), the opposition to increased transport taxes in Brazil (2013), democracy protests in Hong Kong (2014), the BLM movement in the United States, which partially overlapped with Occupy, but has been active since January 2015, and Nuit debout in Paris (2016). The new protest movement must be the starting point for any critical contemporary analysis.

Where are we? We already have several important status statements that try to give an assessment of the situation, of the capital crisis and the new protests, including the Comité invisibles Today and Rancière's small interview book And quel temps vivons-nous? They are all trying to analyze why the uprisings have not progressed and evolved into actual revolutions. For committee invisible the uprising is the important thing – what happens in the confrontation with capitalist normality, its police and screens. They articulate the project negatively; it's about dismissal as a dispossession of power, where a release occurs and something alive occurs on the streets in the fight against the state. Rancière, of course, does not formulate a program – he is not for nothing "the ignorant teacher" – but he notes the difficulties the protest movements have in connecting alternative collective forms with the fight against an enemy – linking autonomy with class struggle.

The autonomy of multitude. Hardt and Negri believe the habit is somewhat more optimistic in their analysis than the others, though they agree that it is not possible to return to some Keynesian solution in the post-2 period. World War. That project is over, they write. But Hardt and Negri see opportunities where the others see problems and blockages, which is at the same time the strength and weakness of their analysis. The combination of the Copernican turn in Italian workerism, in which the working class (the living work) is the real creator of value, and Foucault's dynamic analysis of the "primacy" of resistance does not merely allow an analysis of the new conditions – "financial rule and neoliberal governance" they call it in the new book – but also point out the already ongoing excess of these. As they write: “Today production is increasingly social in a dual sense. On the one hand, people produce more and more socially, in networking and through interaction, and on the other, the result of production is not just goods, but social conditions and ultimately society. ”The analysis of this development is both the description of a more and more more invasive capital and a designation of its parasitic being – and thus a designation of the autonomy of multitude, its ability to produce a society; another community, of course. Neoliberal governance and financial capital rule over all productive conditions, but there is also opposition throughout. In fact, the overwhelming repression shows how scared the ruling class is of the multitude and its complex creatures.
tivity.

Neoliberalism has tried to take ownership of the notion of the entrepreneur, but it is the amount and the living work that are the real entrepreneurs.

From economics to politics. Hardt and Negri, of course, acknowledge that the new protest movements have not yet succeeded in their project. Possible conditions for a break are present, but the break apparently has not happened. In other words, the transition from economy to politics seems to be waiting, which is not least due to the movements' inability to think about political organization. The two authors argue in favor of the idea of ​​horizontality – which is in part a self-criticism, since Hardt and Negri have, more than anyone else, advocated for organizing resistance to empire and capitalism as a flat and expansive network without center. IN Declaration they hailed the space occupation movements for not having leaders and spokesmen, but now they write that the horizontal movements are not enough in themselves; they must also have leaders. It has been right to criticize the political parties of the labor movement and the Leninist avant-garde, but it is a mistake to believe that the revolution should not be organized, they write now. This is new.

The problem, of course, is that the old forms of political organization have been destroyed and new ones have not yet been developed. Hardt and Negri therefore propose a solution to the classic contradiction between spontaneity and leadership, where the movement now acts strategically and management tactically. Usually it's the other way around. Thereafter, the movement must project a long-term direction, while the management may be allowed to act tactically in specific situations, such as in demonstrations. The starting point for this turnaround is that the movement already has the necessary knowledge and organizational ability to fight against and not least produce something else. As the authors write in one of the book's more thought-provoking formulations, multitude is characterized by entrepreneurship. Neoliberalism has tried to capture the notion of the entrepreneur, but it is the multitude and the living work that produce the world and therefore they are real entrepreneurs. Therefore, the term must be recaptured. Communism as Entrepreneurship!

A new kind of revolution. This recapture takes place in accordance with Hardt and Negri's use of Foucault's concept of power, which they believed was a necessary extension of Marxism's notion of power. After all, when social becomes productive, exploitation or power expands. Therefore, the analysis of the disposition of capitalist production must be extended beyond the factory yield. That was what Foucault had embarked on in his analysis of power, and which the authors therefore see as a crucial further development of Western Marxism. Power is everywhere and it is inherent in social. But more importantly, it is a dynamic relationship where the dominant can resist and reject power. Power is always uncertain – there is no omnipotent ruler, neither Leviathan nor Empire. Therefore, the project for Hardt and Negri is not to take power, but to "take power in another way"; beyond the private property and national identity, where the multitude throws away the mediation of capital and creates another society.