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Time, space and revolution

Le monde des Grands Projets et six alone. Voyage of the new religious revolutionaries
Forfatter: Serge Quadruppani
Forlag: La Découverte (Frankrike)
On the other side of the barricades, activists are building a society where they own their own time. 




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

French writer and journalist Serge Quadruppani, who belongs to the left-communist environment in France and Italy and was, among other things, editor of the magazine La Banquise at the beginning of the 1980s, for a number of years traveled around and wrote reports on self-organized forms of resistance. Now he has written a longer book, Le monde des Grands Projets et six alone – "The World of Great Projects and Its Enemies" – presenting these entities as new revolutionary collective subjects fighting logistical capitalism and its ever-expanding reach. 

The book is an important contribution to the analysis of the latest phase of capitalist exploitation as well as of the ongoing cycle of protest. Quadruppani's journalistic presentation complements the more philosophical approaches that the Comité invisibles Today, Rancières And quel temps vivons-nous? and Hardt and Negris Assembly (all reviewed in Ny Tid of the undersigned). The detailed descriptions of the forms of resistance show that there is a revolutionary form of subjectivity even in the Old West, and not only among the masses in North Africa and in Southeast Asia. It is in the anti-development activism Quadruppani sees this new rise.  

Empire

ZAD (Zone à Défendre) in Notre-Dame-de-Landes, where activists have been fighting for the construction of a new airport for a decade, and No Tav, which since 1995 has been protesting against the construction of a high-speed railway between Turin and Lyon, are the two most important examples the author gives of the new resistance. The enemies of development are fighting against capitalism as well as the state, and for nature and the right to decide for themselves how the local environment should look and be organized. 

The empire is located in deterritorialized non-places such as Dubai, Silicon Valley, City of London and Zhongnanhai.

The starting point for Quadruppani's presentation of the new forms of resistance is the modern capitalism that they are fighting. It is the group's rejection of the state and capital that, according to Quadruppani, provides an explicitly revolutionary perspective. Quadruppani describes what he calls "the empire" in the aftermath of the movements (and Negri and Hardt): a capitalist civilization that has engulfed the world, where multinational corporations, investment funds, NGOs, oil terrorists, intelligence agencies and major nation states all together form a new , deterritorialized geoeconomic order – or rather disorder. The hallmark of the empire is the joining of mafia and finance, where it is more about managing chaos than about resolving conflicts. Administration and business, governance and economics are merging in ever-new ways in this fragmented world, where money and the rich move at lightning speed while the poor are slumped or jailed. The empire is an uncompromising capital that has long ceased to make agreements – everything must either be capitalized or thrown outside in an uneven topography of fortified luxury on the one hand and colonized misery on the other. 

Non-places

The empire is increasingly tending to disassociate itself from specific geopolitical contexts and place itself in deterritorialized non-places such as Dubai, Silicon Valley, City of London and Zhongnanhai. Nevertheless, the empire still needs people (as labor) and nature (as a resource) to create added value and profit. Therefore, the empire concretizes – so to speak, descending to earth from its financial and symbolic orbit and organizing the world in its image. 

Serge Quadruppani

The most important ways the empire transforms the world are through war and major infrastructure projects – such as the aforementioned airport and train line – as well as dams, wind farms, highways and urbanization. If war is the negative side of the empire then infrastructure development is the imperative positive of the empire, which the vast majority will probably immediately welcome. Who can resist a new airport or a faster train connection? After all, it involves new jobs, more tourism – in short Fremskridt. Capitalism at its best. 

As Quadruppani shows, it is this self-evident capitalism in which the world is set up for profit, the ZAD and No Tav activists reject. 

Communism

The pervasive capture and fragmentation of the globe, where containers and computers at once connect and divide us into a vast and violent distribution system – what Quadruppani calls the "urbanization of the world" – is what this new activism is trying to fight. There are many forms of action, but first and foremost, the protesting areas occupy the infrastructure work to take place, and hedge themselves there. 

In ZAD, a veritable mini-community emerged – a stateless and cashless experiment – where farmers, artists, architects, students, locals and travelers gathered in the action against the airport: They "lived" the resistance together. Faced with the boundless growth imperative of the empire, the new revolutionaries practiced a balanced interweaving with their surroundings. In germ form, thus, a life is lived beyond the structural violence of wage labor – a communist life. 

Composite

One of the interesting things about Quadruppani's book is its contribution to the historicization of militant anti-capitalism. As the author writes, logistical capitalism has given shape to a new subversive subject: it is no longer the worker and factory that is the starting point for anti-capitalism; now the battle takes place in environments outside the city or in the countryside. The front has expanded, and now people are fighting both the wars of capital – as in Syria and Palestine – and against its huge construction projects to stop the cannibalization of the planet.

Farmers, artists, architects, students, locals and travelers "lived" the opposition to the airport together.

Quadruppani records a movement from the industrial proletariat of social democracy and Leninism to a more complex and openly revolutionary subject. There is a clear ecocritical dimension to the new activism: the Empire is rejected, but the enemies of big projects also create something new. The rejection of the time of capital opens another space and enables a different temporality. In this revolutionary man regains his subjective temporal autonomy – if only for a brief moment. 

Behind the barricade

An inventory is made with the official calendar dictated by the state and the market, an inventory with the transformation of the individual's time into exchangeable quantity, an inventory with the market logic and with the state form. The ZADs are building houses and not going home, and Nuit's debut is up at night. 

They take control of time by setting the pace and being in the moment, coexisting, rejecting the capital's permanent injunction on shopping and optimizing body and knowledge for the purpose of competition. Or they intensify the time in a sabotage or occupation of a space or university. 

Quadruppani's empire is characterized by the joining of mafia and finance, where it is about managing chaos more than resolving conflicts.

Behind the barricade, another time and space is emerging. That is why the French police have been so busy taking ZAD over the past few months – to destroy the other world that has been built up on the other side – in the largest police operation in France.
rich since May 1968, at a cost of 400 euros a day and with 000 policemen equipped with armored personnel carts, bulldozers, drones, cameras and 2500 tear gas grenades. 

ZAD must be gone. It has been decided that the airport should not be erected, but that does not mean that the empire will not do anything to shut down the enemies of its major projects.



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Mikkel Bolt
Mikkel Bolt
Professor of political aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen.

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