Matt Broomfield
The political philosopher and exiled militant Antonio Negri died this week at the age of 90. He leaves behind him a significant intellectual heritage, attempting with his partner Michael Hardt to identify the new challenges posed by global capitalist hegemony following the collapse of the USSR-led project in state communism at the start of the 1990s, and to explore the potential for new, networked forms of struggle and resistance following the decline of the traditional, industrial working class and subsequent acknowledgement that ‘the age of proletarian internationalism is over’. Negri is also remembered as a staunch intellectual and political supporter of the militant Kurdish movement, reportedly describing jailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan as the ‘Antonio Gramsci of his land’, in a reference to the Italian militant thinker who similarly smuggled his vital contributions to post-Marxist revolutionary theory out of a fascist jail cell.
Though following distinct intellectual traditions, both thinkers thought to create a global theory of what Hardt and Negri call ‘Empire’ and Öcalan ‘capitalist modernity’, recognising the productive yet troublesome contradiction in a communist theory which sought to achieve a decentralised, post-state internationalism through the vehicle of national liberation struggles. As Negri has bitterly noted, there’s a sense in which ‘internationalism’ was achieved not because but in spite of communism’s historic efforts with the forces opposed to socialist emancipation at once absolute and evanescent, decentralised and ubiquitous. Hardt and Negri’s seminal text ‘Empire’, published the year after the collapse of the old East-West national divisions led inexorably to Öcalan’s own capture, brilliantly diagnosed the universal, total scale of the challenge facing a perhaps terminally-weakened Left, struggling to find purchase on the smooth terrain of USA-led capitalist hegemony.
Serving as both the eulogy for a century of Leftist struggle and a call-to-arms for a new millennium, ‘Empire’ has nonetheless met with criticism on a number of points. The most significant critiques address the authors’ effort to represent the new fulcrum of political organisation, replacing the closely-defined, militantly-organised proletariat of Leningrad in 1917 or the mid-century Chinese peasant class, as a ‘multitude’, uniting almost all humans worldwide through a condition of exploitation which reaches far beyond the factory floor into our everyday intellectual, emotional and physical activity and relations, or ‘social production’. This global, total vision of domination is powerful and accurate, but also dangerously vague. The struggles of turn-of-the-century political and social movements to establish themselves as genuine forces of systemic change attest to the challenges facing any political movement built off the back of such a global, totalising analysis (a danger Hardt and Negri are able to acknowledge in the closing chapter of ‘Empire’).
Öcalan’s contribution, as what Gramsci would call an ‘organic intellectual’ embedded in and emerging from his people’s struggle, has been to link a similarly totalising account of history and the extent to which hierarchy and repression emerge from our own, unwitting actions and activity to a very particular vision for the Kurdish people, their homeland in the ‘cradle of civilisation’, and their potentially world-historical role in this contemporary geopolitical battleground. The interplay between national struggles and a vision for a post-national, global political order is thus resolved through Kurdish militancy which at the same time struggles to dissolve the nationalist principles which have long animated this militancy.
Though the international playing-field appeared insurmountably lopsided at the end of the 1990s, national sovereignty has not been wholly supplanted by a model of biopower, with political struggle occurring on the level of individual consumption, repression or activity alone: rather, the ‘end of history’ has ended, and what Öcalan was early to define as ‘World War Three’will bring about fresh crises of statist violence and national upheaval. Indeed, forces which animated 20th-century struggle will be more relevant than ever in the coming decades. It very much remains to be seen whether the Kurdish movement can unite with other national and transnational movements to successfully pursue a bolder, more universal cause than mere self-determination alone: but this hybrid fusion of national struggle and anti-nationalist politics may well mark a vital step along the long path toward global emancipation.
Empire ends with a typically-provocative appeal for militants to follow in the footsteps of none other than St. Francis of Assisi, by “identifying in the common condition of the multitude its enormous wealth”. And indeed, there is a curious parallel between the holy men of centuries past and the secular militants inspired by Öcalan’s vision, travelling clandestinely throughout the Middle East and beyond with little beyond the clothes on their back to beg a bed for the night and spread their leader’s vision through parables. This link perhaps suggests the risks inherent in promoting a universal political message which could appear so grand and profound as to have little relevance to ordinary peoples’ lives. But it also suggests the radical, transformative potential of these ideas. Perhaps Negri’s bold but forlorn call to arms will be answered yet.
*Matt Broomfield is a freelance journalist, poet and activist. He writes for VICE, Medya News, the New Statesman and the New Arab; his prose has been published by The Mays, Anti-Heroin Chic and Plenitude; and his poetry by the National Poetry Society, the Independent, and Bare Fiction. His work was displayed across London by Poetry on the Underground, and he is a Foyle Young Poet of the Year.
