jason e. smith the politics an incivility_autonomia and tiqqun

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Jason E. Smith e Politics of Incivility: Autonomia and Tiqqun Who, after all, still speaks of “society” other than the citizens of Empire, who have come or rather huddled together against the self-evidence of Empire’s final implosion, against the ontological obviousness of civil war? —Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War Italy’s Creeping May e summer and fall of 1969 in Italy’s northern industrial cities witnessed intense confrontations between capital and labor, most exemplarily at the Fiat factory in Mirafiori on the outskirts of Turin. 1 ese struggles were novel insofar as they took place largely outside the direction of the unions and the classical institutions of the workers’ movement. Moreover, they focused their antagonistic force on severing the link between demands for higher wages and levels of productivity—a correlation enforced by the unions. is recast the wage as an “independent variable,” no longer understood as the price of labor-power but as what came to be called, within the movement, a political price to be extracted from capital in exchange for a provisional social stability. Separating wages from productivity represented a decisive break with the social pact drawn up in Italy between labor and capital after World War II, a pact that made the structurally antagonistic forces of labor and capital into partners sharing the fruits of the so-called postwar “economic miracle.” De-linking wages from productivity transformed the wage from an objective mediation between capital and labor into an index of worker “needs” that would be unilaterally asserted by the class itself. is made the wage into the lever of destabilization, and wage demands into an affirmation of “worker power [ potere operaio].” e Italian state responded to this worker assault by depressing the value of wages through monetary policy (artificially induced inflation) and by expanding the class struggle onto the urban terrain and into the sphere of social reproduction. It did so by unilaterally raising the costs of public housing, transportation, and utilities. e urban proletariat countered in turn with new tactics and forms of struggle, so-called “auto-reductions,” which referred to the organization, at the local and neighborhood level, of unilateral price reductions for these same public services. Whereas the struggles inside the factory were devoted to the establishment of a “political” price for

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The POlitics an Incivility_Autonomia and Tiqqun

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  • Jason E. Smith

    The Politics of Incivility: Autonomia and Tiqqun

    Who, after all, still speaks of society other than the citizens of Empire, who have come or rather huddled together against the self-evidence of Empires final implosion, against the ontological obviousness of civil war?

    Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War

    Italys Creeping May The summer and fall of 1969 in Italys northern industrial cities witnessed intense confrontations between capital and labor, most exemplarily at the Fiat factory in Mirafiori on the outskirts of Turin.1 These struggles were novel insofar as they took place largely outside the direction of the unions and the classical institutions of the workers movement. Moreover, they focused their antagonistic force on severing the link between demands for higher wages and levels of productivitya correlation enforced by the unions. This recast the wage as an independent variable, no longer understood as the price of labor-power but as what came to be called, within the movement, a political price to be extracted from capital in exchange for a provisional social stability. Separating wages from productivity represented a decisive break with the social pact drawn up in Italy between labor and capital after World War II, a pact that made the structurally antagonistic forces of labor and capital into partners sharing the fruits of the so-called postwar economic miracle. De-linking wages from productivity transformed the wage from an objective mediation between capital and labor into an index of worker needs that would be unilaterally asserted by the class itself. This made the wage into the lever of destabilization, and wage demands into an affirmation of worker power [potere operaio].

    The Italian state responded to this worker assault by depressing the value of wages through monetary policy (artificially induced inflation) and by expanding the class struggle onto the urban terrain and into the sphere of social reproduction. It did so by unilaterally raising the costs of public housing, transportation, and utilities. The urban proletariat countered in turn with new tactics and forms of struggle, so-called auto-reductions, which referred to the organization, at the local and neighborhood level, of unilateral price reductions for these same public services. Whereas the struggles inside the factory were devoted to the establishment of a political price for

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    wages, the struggles outside the factory wallsin the sphere of social reproduction, in the cityattempted to extract political prices for those commodities and services necessary for the reproduction of the working class. The tactic of auto-reduction, initially deployed in the sphere of worker needs (housing, utilities, transportation) gradually expanded or drifted into what we can call spaces of desire (cultural events, cinema, concerts). The implementation of auto-reductions by the urban proletariat in the early 1970s coincided with the emergence of proletarian youth circles (particularly in Milan) whose social base was composed not of the waged working class but of urban youth and the unemployed. These youth circles and the larger social layer they moved within practiced forms of illegality such as the occupation of squats, the organized gate-crashing of cultural events, and the systematic looting of supermarkets and stores. These forms of diffuse illegality converged and were synthesized under the slogan Lets take the city!, which identified the city at large as a site of antagonism, while insisting upon the direct appropriation (take) of urban space.

    The emergence of the Autonomia movement can be identified, in a first glance, with the increasingly widespread deployment of this tactic in Italian cities, a proliferation of actions that echoed each other without ever cohering into a unified struggle. The form of these actions, whose reverberation was sometimes characterized by the actors themselves as part of a diffuse guerilla war (easily reproducible actions undertaken spontaneously, with no strategic coordination), were themselves the symptom of a more profound shift in the composition of the urban working class, whose layers now included elements traditionally outside the classical Marxist definition of productive labor: students, the unemployed, and women. It would be from these layers that the Autonomia movement would draw its strength. The emergence of the Autonomia in the middle of this creeping Mayaround 1973 to 1975marked a deep shift in the nature of social conflict in Italy: a displacement of the site of conflict from the factory to society or the city as a whole, the entire metropolitan fabric.

    In this essay, I want to lay out the importance of this shift, which sees the city or the metropolisthe space of the circulation and realization of value, the site of the reproduction of the capitalist relations of productionas an increasingly embattled terrain. This terrain will witness the irruption of new forms of social conflict whose aims are not only the seizure of the factory as the specific site of the production of surplus value, but also the reappropriation of the whole of life, a move outside of the factory walls and into the spaces of everyday life. The importance of this displacement

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    and transformation of social conflict in Italy has recently been underlined and analyzed by the Franco-Italian grouping Tiqqun. In their long essay This Is Not a Program, Tiqqun argues that any possibility, today, of a re-emergence of insurrectionary politics means abandoning the punctual, and still enigmatic, model of Frances May 68 and reactivating the forms of struggle that emerged over the course of Italys creeping May, and in particular during the period of the Autonomia movement (1973-1977). Such a reactivation will also require sorting out the different and often conflicting tendencies within that movement. The most important bifurcation within the movement, as we will see, was the tension between the libertarian or creative elements of the movement and what was called the organized wing of Autonomia. Tiqqun argues that this organized tendency will exhibit Leninist tendencies and certain theoretical presuppositions that will make of it an objective ally of the Italian Communist Partythe same Italian Communist Party that would denounce Autonomia as a formless grouping of untorelli [plague-carriers] and even, on occasion, fascists. Finally, Tiqqun argues that the recent work of Antonio Negri, the most well-known figure from the organized tendency of Autonomia, reproduces these same theoretical errors. The formation of a new space of social conflict today must set it sights on combatting the diffusion, within the new social movements and anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s, of what Tiqqun calls Negriism.

    The Prequel: The Workerist Tradition and Worker AutonomyIn order to understand the role of the so-called organized tendency within the Autonomia movement, it is necessary to understand how this tendency materialized within a theoretical tendency called operaismo. The workerist tradition is a distinctly Italian strain of Marxism that emerged in the late 1950s, and included now well-known figures such as Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri. This tradition had at its core a methodological devotion to the analysis of what it called class composition. This composition is itself twofold: the technical composition of the working class defined by its social existence as labor-power, and the political composition of the working class as a textured unity achieved in a given antagonistic sequence. What is decisive here is the dialectical relationship between, on the one hand, the forms of organization and vectors of proletarian struggle possible in any given historical conjuncture and, on the other hand, the material disposition of the working class, i.e. its objective inscription in the production process in relation to both the technical apparatus of production and the planning and execution of that process. At the center of the

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    workerist research program was the historical analysis of a mutation in class composition from a composition rooted in the hegemony of the skilled worker of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to a new subjective figure, the so-called mass worker, the de-skilled worker of the Taylorist factory that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike the skilled workers of the old labor aristocracy, the newer mass workers were so estranged from the conditions of their own labor that they were increasingly incapable of either identifying themselves as producers or of demanding the right to manage their own productive activity. According to Mario Tronti, the most important theorist of the mass worker, the post-Taylorist working class that emerged in the 1920s and 30s understood that its accumulation of political strength was founded on its separation from its economic existence as labor-power. The working class built and tested this political strength by denying itself as a productive force and by conceiving of its labor-power as capital, so that its own labor became a capitalist enemy to be destroyed. In the case of both the skilled and mass worker, this subjective figure of the working class was understood to be a hegemonic tendency within an otherwise stratified and segmented class composition.2 The task of workerist analysis was to identify which sectors of the new mass-worker class were the most antagonistic to capital and were located at the most strategic points within the productive framework in order to anticipate latent forms and sites of conflict this new subjective figure might be ready for.

    The new subjective figure of the mass worker confronted a new form of power, a collective figure of capital. This new power consisted in a consolidation of capitalist strategy in the form of a social capital that integrated the interests of individual capitals within a single collective vision. This collective figure of capital assumed the form of a State that took upon itself the task of planning the entire valorization process in an attempt to coordinate the formerly unarticulated spheres of production and consumption, factory and society. This state-like figure of capital was no longer content to operate at the juridical level (ensuring the smooth functioning of labor markets, for example), but began to penetrate the social at large, integrating the entire social fabric into a single strategic vision. First and foremost, this vision required that the workers movement be included in a new social pact or deal whose backbone was the keying of wage demands to increases in productivity. In principle, this pact would result in social unity.

    By the early 70s, however, Negri began to theorize a breakdown of this deal and the emergence of a new figure of the State that withdrew from its pact with labor and began to govern through

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    a combination of strategically staged crises and planned disorder, both social and political. This new figure of capitalist power, governing through instability and through exceptional measuresan everyday state of emergencywas said to be confronted with a new antagonistic subject that could no longer be identified with the waged mass worker and the factory or point of production. Capital had subsumed society, which resulted in an increasing convergence of the spheres of production and social reproduction. This convergence induced a destabilization of all the categories of political economyproductive and unproductive, production and reproduction, employed and unemployed, waged and unwaged.

    Unlike the situation in Italy just after World War II, when a plan designed to stabilize class antagonism through a productive pact between capital and labor was hammered out by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the bourgeois parties, the new form of power which Negri identified with the Crisis State found itself opposed by a new social force that also refused this social pact. As Tronti had anticipated, this new power affirmed its separation from its identity as a productive force, radically negating its economic existence as labor-power. This separation gave it an autonomy not simply from the institutions of the workers movement, but from work or productive activity altogether. This break would not take the form of the mass workers demand for political wages uncoupled from levels of production, because the wage itself was no longer objective measure of value but the measure of the political and antagonistic strength of the class-in-struggle.3 It would instead take the form of a secession from the wage relation altogether, in favor of (at the level of tactics, at least) the direct seizure of use-values.

    Tiqqun and The Two SocietiesOver the course of Italys creeping May, a gap widened between the Autonomia movement and the official workers movement represented at the political level by the Italian Communist Party (PCI). February and March of 1977 witnessed confrontations between the PCI and what came to be called Autonomia or the area of Autonomy. Often taking place in cities like Bologna where the Communist Party controlled the political apparatus and managed the forces of order, these skirmishes and pitched battles bore witness not to a conflict between a working-class culture and a petit-bourgeois student movement, but rather to a deep crack that was opening up at the heart of Italian society itself.

    In September of that year, Enrico Berlinguer, Secretary of the PCI, did not hesitate to speak of the Autonomists as fascists and plague-carriers [untorelli] (a reference to Manzonis novel I

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    promessi, about the sixteenth-century plague of Milan). Around the same time, Alberto Asor Rosa, a former member of the far-left grouping Potere Operaio [Worker Power] who re-entered the PCI with Mario Tronti in the early 1970s, spoke of a deep and potentially unbridgeable cleavage in Italian society, indeed of two societies. One society was made up of the classical workers movement with its network of institutions and political and economic organs. This first society, rooted in the Northern cities and controlling entire regions at the political level, had formed a parliamentary alliance with the center-right Christian Democrats, and, most importantly, espoused an ethos of work. The second society was composed of a complex stratification of students, the unemployed, the precariously employed, southern immigrants, proletarian youth circles, and other strays who refused this ethos of work and who even refused worker identity altogether. Although he avoided the imprecations of Berlinguer, Asor Rosa nevertheless described the area of Autonomy using classical Marxist taunts, characterizing them as an unproductive and therefore parasitic strata that refused the goals shared by the workers movement and capital (development), as well refusing all forms of social mediation. He argued that these strata that made up the second society were unable to assume enough distance from themselves to comprehend the PCIs strategic compromise with the center-right. The parasitic strata were, he lamented, completely absorbed by the hard and desperate perception of their own needs (Asor Rosa 63, qtd. in Wright 200).

    In 2001, a French collective enigmatically calling itself Tiqqun published an essay with the title This Is Not a Program offering an analysis of and a coming to terms with Italys creeping May (Tiqqun, Tout a failli 9-118). The name Tiqqun was drawn from the Jewish messianic tradition and means reparation, restitution or mending. The group formed on the margins of French ultra-left and autonomist milieus. It used the occasion of the essay to forcefully separate itself from what they calls the French maceration, that is, the French political classes provincialism and the manner in which it had come to ritualize and institutionalize the commemoration of the insurrectionary events of May 1968. Just as importantly, Tiqqun analyzed the different, often conflicting tendencies within the movement of Autonomia. These conflicts emerged more or less in the middle of the slow creep of a decade of struggles, and surfaced most virulently in the first months of 1977. For Tiqqun, the possibility of a new form of insurrectionary politics required, then, a bracketing of the French political classes narrow focus on the events of May 1968; it required, in turn, an analysis of what they deemed the more radical possibilities opened by the Italian movement of

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    1977. This analysis hinges on what Tiqqun characterizes as the weakness of the so-called organized tendency within Autonomia, a movement headed by, among others, Antonio Negrian Antonio Negri who would eventually publish, one year prior to the publication of This Is Not a Program, the book Empire with Michael Hardt. As we will see, the critical analysis of Negris role in the Autonomia movement is motivated in large part by Tiqquns desire to critique his role as chief theorist of the so-called anti-globalization (or altermondialiste) movement that emerged in the late 1990s.

    Tiqquns analysis of the 1977 movement hinges on its critique of Asor Rosas theory of two societies. Tiqqun found Asor Rosas thesis on the contemporary cleavage between two societies particularly symptomatic given his role as one of the founders of the operaismo, his involvement in founding the workerist journals Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia, and his close proximity to the chief theoretical figure of this tradition, Mario Tronti. Tiquun argues that Asor Rosas thesis reveals a set of unexpectedly shared theoretical and political commitments between avowed enemies: the PCI, on the one hand, and those post-workerist tendencies within the movement on the other, tendencies that included remnants of the groupuscule Potere Operaio and Negri, one of its former leaders. Demonstrating the theoretical and implicitly political convergence between the post-workerist, organized element of Autonomia and the PCIavowed enemiesforms the heart of Tiqquns reading of the failures of the movement of 1977.

    Tiqqun argues that what must have been disconcerting for Asor Rosa about the second of these so-called societies was not only its refusal of all political mediation (class, party, representation) but of all social mediations (work, wage, money) as well, a stance that gave rise to increasingly unruly forms of incivility. This so-called societys recourse to force and its assertion of use-values through direct appropriation occurred as a form of everyday life, a profusion of tactics with no reference to the strategic horizon of social transformation as conceived by traditional Marxisms and communisms. That this other society deployed a set of uncivil means not subordinated to political ends was not the least of its enigmas. Asor Rosa and the PCI angled to frame this illegibility in orthodox terms, describing it as a reformatted version of the nineteenth centurys dangerous classes and their lumpen criminality. Meanwhile, an element within the area of Autonomia itself, so-called organized Autonomia, strained to characterize this other society as a diverse array of new social subjects or, in Negris case, as a new socialized worker [operaio sociale] defined, in part and paradoxically, by its refusal of the discipline of work. According to Tiqqun, lurking beneath

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    both of these responses (Asor Rosas and Negris) to this apparent counter-society was the suspicion that what the area of Autonomy proposed was a novel form of struggle that was first and foremost a- or even anti-social: a new form of social war waged on the social itself by an uncertain web of communities or forms-of-life, or what Sergio Bologna famously described as a tribe of moles. Through Asor Rosas thesis, the PCI was able to use classical Marxist terms to assert the increasingly unmanageable internal fracture between what it saw as a productive class and a marginal, parasitic one. On the one hand, Tiqqun finds that Asor Rosas thesis concerning the emergence of two societies has the merit of breaking with that which every socialism, and thus every Left, seeks to preserve even if it takes a massacrethe fiction of an ultimate social unity. To speak of two societies, however, obscures two things at once:

    First, that the first society no longer exists, having entered into a process of continuous implosion and, second, that what gets recomposed as an ethical tissue beyond this implosion, the Imaginary Party, is in no way one, and in no way can it be unified in a new, isolatable totality, a second society. (Tiqqun, Tout a failli 50)

    If the PCI labored to underline the split between these two societies, one productive, one unproductive, the tendency of organized Autonomia desired in its turn to heal this fracture between the two societies by dilating the concept of productive labor so widely that it included even the unemployed or precariously employed. Organized Autonomy struggled to recompose a social unity in order to secure the internal logic of classical politics, according to which a political organization would direct and manage the struggles of a new class formation by imposing discipline and articulating a theoretical and strategic vision. To reconstruct this fragmented or, to use Tiqquns terms, imploded social unity, organized Autonomys theoretical proposalsespecially Negris socialized workerrepresent a commitment to the fiction of the social and to the metaphysics of production.

    The errors of the organized wing of Autonomy were crippling, according to Tiqqun. The first theoretical error was ascribed to the workerist groupings inability to trace the mutations of the movement as it progressed from the struggles of 1969, occurring largely at the point of production (most emblematically at the enormous Fiat plant at Mirafiori) into the sphere of class reproduction during the struggles of the early 1970s. This drift of the conflict from a privileged site of antagonism (the factory as site of the extraction of surplus-value) outward into the metropolis was occasioned by a decisive slippage within the word autonomy itself. In 1969 autonomy referred first and foremost to the growing separation between the working

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    class and its institutional infrastructure; the class organized its own struggles, asserting its autonomy by refusing the mediations of union and party. By 1977, however, the assertion of worker autonomy gave way to a growing refusal of worker identity altogether. When Negris thesis concerning the socialized worker pushed the sphere of production outside the walls of the factory and into the metropolis and its diffuse factory, it is precisely the reassertion, on Negris part, of the class identity of the worker and the concept of worka productivity now expanded to included non-workthat restores the torn social totality, preserves the classical geometry of conflict between society or movement and state, and calls for the formation of a political organization that can both represent society and direct, from its strategic vantage point, the struggles of the class.

    Negriism and the Ruins of Civil SocietyIn Empire, Negri and Hardt describe the new form of power that Negri already saw emerging in the 1970sthe Crisis-State that rules through planned disorder and continuous suspension of normalityas a form of sovereignty that operates, at the global level, through the sovereign suspension of the law and through police actions against perceived risks or threats that are not recognized as proper political enemies. They understand sovereignty to be a diffuse form of power not localized at a given point (neither in the factory nor in the state). Tiqqun nevertheless identifies in Hardt and Negri a kind of fetishistic split between their theoretical account of imperial sovereignty and the practical and political conclusions drawn from this analysis by Negri and by what Tiqqun violently satirizes as Negriism.4 Tiqqun suggests that Negri and Hardt know that imperial sovereignty is impersonal and that it therefore cannot be confronted or addressed as a subject standing over against the new social subject (a new social subject that is no longer called the socialized worker, but the multitude). And yet Negriism according to Tiqqun acts as if it was a personal form of sovereignty, a form of power one can make demands of, a subject with which one could form a pact or make a deal. This is particularly the case, they argue, when one considers the concrete demands they offer at the end of Empire: the demands for both a social wage and for global citizenship. These two demands presuppose the idea of a society founded on production and on a form of state sovereignty whose juridical framework has given way to Empire and its biopolitical form of power. As Tiqqun puts it:

    The entire Negrian perspective boils down to this: to force Empire to take on the form of a universal State, by staging the emergence of a so-called global civil society. [...] The

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    Negrians want Empire to take a juridical form, they want to have a personal sovereignty sitting across from them, an institutional subject with which to enter into contract or take over power. The global civil society that they call for merely betrays their desire for a global State. (Introduction to Civil War 161-62)5The demand for a social wage called for in Empire would have

    to be addressed to what Tiqqun here calls a universal State, an institutional subject; it would have to be demanded, in turn, by a global civil society, a society that according to Tiqqun no longer exists. The concept of the social wagea wage paid to all members of society whether employed or notrests on a fundamental thesis that Negri developed in the 1970s with his theory of the socialized worker and the diffuse factory (productive activity identified with the whole of society, the factory become social or disseminated throughout the metropolis). The point of production is now identified not with a determined site within the social totality but rather with the entirety of that totality, such that the classical Marxist distinctions between productive and unproductive labor, between the spheres of reproduction and production, between time of life and the time of work, and between work and non-work (whose symptom is the flexible, precarious worker) no longer hold. It follows that there is no element of society that does not produce value and surplus-value and, as a result, there is no social actor that does not contribute to, and have a right to a share of, the total social product. The concept of the socialized worker identifies every node of the social as a point of production and also includes each of these nodes in a single social pact guaranteed by and mediated by the wage. At best, Tiqqun argues, the social wage is a neo-Keynesian mechanism of income redistribution in view of stimulating effective demand. Its strategic function, they argue, is political in nature: a social remuneration for political passivity, a bribe enforcing social integration and citizen participation (Tiqqun, Tout a failli 288). This process of inclusion, this process of complete socialization, founds the political right to a global citizenship: to produce is to be worthy of citizenship.

    Taking and Leaving the City: Communism in the Ruins of Civil Society

    Where isour version of the Commune? asks David Harvey at a crucial moment of his influential and programmatic text Right to the City. At what point will we witness a massive collision between contemporary processes of urbanization and those populations violently impacted by these processes? The city has always been the

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    site of a convergence between, on the one hand, the accumulation and concentration of surplus capital and, on the other hand, the proletarianization of populations separated from the means of production. The city has always been the name for the point of intersection between flows of money and flows of labor-power. The city, and more specifically the privileged site of the factory as point of production, has always constituted the arena within which surplus-value is extracted and concentrated in the hands of private forces. And yet the sort of massive makeovers of urban space undertaken by Baron von Haussmann in Paris in the 1850s and 1860s occur today on a global scale. These newly made-over urban spaces materialize a form of accumulation that occurs not simply through the production and appropriation of surplus-value, but also and especially through what Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession, that is, a direct confiscation of the urban commons operated by the State, usually under the aegis of civic improvement or the production of civilized spaces.6

    The city as the site of collision between labor-power and capital is by definition the locus of class struggle. Today, however, capital itself acts as a class or as what Marx called social capital. And in so doing, capital moves into the sphere of social reproduction, to activities and spaces outside the factory and the point of production, to sites where the reproduction of the class relation itself is carried out. This means transforming metropolitan spacehousing, transportation, food, everyday lifeinto an antagonistic terrain. Haussmanns campaign required both the implementation of new financial and credit systems as well as the brute application of force to dislodge the urban proletariat from its neighborhoods and homes, and therefore it could be successful only for so long. It could not but give rise, Harvey suggests, to a counter-attack by the partisans of the urban commons, a revolt motivated by a desire to take back the city on the part of those dispossessed by [Haussmanns] works (36). For the insurrectionaries of the Commune taking back the city required, among other initiatives, the seizure of military power within the city and the exemplary act of torching the Hotel de Ville (although they inexplicably failed, as Lenin despaired, to take over the central bank). And yet when Harvey envisions a contemporary version of the Commune, he offers only a modest proposal, namely greater democratic control over the production and utilization of surplus (37). He calls for a right to the city, a nod and homage to Henri Lefebvres 1968 text of the same name.

    We can contrast Lefebvres and Harveys calls for a right to the city with a slogan that appeared in Italy in the early 1970s: Lets take the city! [Prendiamoci la citt!]. What the French call

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    Italys creeping May, spanning from the worker revolts of 1969 to the insurrectionary situation of 1977, represents a slow spiraling of social conflict outward from the factory into the metropolis. The factory workers of 1969 demanded a political wage indexed not to productivity but to worker needs, whereas the 1977 urban insurrectionaries demanded the direct appropriation of spaces of desire that no longer referred to either the productivity of capital or proletarian needs.

    For Tiqqun, the movement of 1977 lets us glimpse, instead, a fatal crumbling of the social totality itself and the emergence, within the ruins of the social itself, of what they call an ethical tissue consisting in the conflictual play between (borrowing and developing a concept from Agamben) forms-of-life. From the moment civil society is subsumed by the statewhether in the hard version of the authoritarian states of the mid-twentieth century or the soft version of the social democratic welfare stateand power is no longer separate from and transcendent to society but immanent to it, the result is the formation of a new diagram of domination, Empire.7 And to this imperial form of domination is opposed not a new social subject, a new figure of the worker, but what Tiqqun calls the Imaginary Party, a purposely skeletal concept or fiction that projects a novel antagonistic figure to come, cropping up in the wastes of the social and in the wake of a logic of class war that, for Tiqqun, is itself in ruins.

    Arguing against Hardt and Negris insistence on the ethos of production and this articulation of the social and the citizen, Tiqqun affirms that any contemporary insurrectionary politics must be a non-citizen politics, a politics that is just as anti-social as it is anti-state, it should refuse to contribute to the solving of the social question (Tout a failli 296). In its most radical figure, a non-citizen politics means a politics oriented toward a secession from the city, a politics that takes leave of the city. Etienne Balibar has recently proposed a politics of civility that would address contemporary cosmopolitical challenges, functioning as the foundation for a potentially global citizenship. In a rather Hobbesian formulation, he adds that political civility would safeguard an always fragile democratic process, preventing it from collapsing into a ferocious state of war. Breaking with this schema of contemporary politics as well as with any demand for a right to the city, Tiqqun proposes instead a politics that takes aim not simply at the procedural aspects of contemporary democratic contestation, but at the figure of civil society itself, in whose remainders we circulate. What is at stake for Tiqqun is a politics that stages itself outside the webs binding citizenship to the city and civility to civil society. In other words

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    they contest an entire civilization that is arguably undergoing a slow-motion implosion punctuated by sudden and increasingly frequent financial crises and ecological disasters. This politics of incivility begins with the assumption that the contemporary dynamics of hostility, the intersecting vectors of insurrection and autonomy, must break with any practice of citizen or of civility, with any simple demands for a right to the city and to its accumulations of power and wealth.

    At the same time, Tiqquns politics of incivility subtly breaks with the powerful slogan and project unfurled in Italy in the 1970s, lets take the city. Tiqqun suggests that if thirty-five years ago it was necessary to exit the factory in order to spread class struggle to the sites of reproduction and consumption, today it is necessary to articulate a different ambition: repeating the ancient Aventine secession and practicing a politics at a distance from the metropolis, taking leave of the city. If the imperial metropolis names the collapse of the distinction between urban and rural, the question Tiqqun poses is this: is it is possible to secede on the spot, disappearing into what the Situationist International once called positive holesmetropolitan red basesat the heart of the contemporary city? In short, is it possible to practice a taking leave of this civilization, to practice an ethos of civil war?

    Notes1. An astonishing fictionalized account of the struggles within Fiats Mirafiori plant is found in Balestrini.2. By speaking of a subjective figure (skilled worker, mass worker, and in Negris case, socialized worker), I am underlining the manner in which a certain layer of the working class is identified as crystallizing the most advanced tendencies within the classin other words, becomes a figure for the class as whole, even though it might represent, quantitatively, a minority.3. In short, a political wage because the wage is no longer treated as an objective mediation between labor and capital nor as a strictly economic category, but as a test of the strength of the working class. The wage, in this case, is not primarily given in exchange for labor-power as a commodity but as the political price to be paid, by capital, for a provisional social peace. To unhinge wage levels from objective, measurable levels of productive activity, means the wage comes to measure the subjective capacity of the working class.4. Perhaps the best example of Negriism, in Tiqquns eyes, is the international organization known as ATTAC, founded in France in 1998. Its 1998 platform asserted that, in order to take up the double challenge of social implosion and political desperation, a dramatic increase in civic activism is necessary. But Negriism would also include the Parisian milieus forming around the journals Multitudes and Le Monde Diplomatique, the positions of a Jos Bov, attempts at greening the economy and so on.5. It must be noted that in the very first pages of Empire, Hardt and Negri explicitly disown the term civil society (Empire 7). See also Negris Journeys through Civil Society (In Memory of Peter Bruckner) in The Politics of Subversion.

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    6. See, for example, The Invisible Committee, particularly the chapter We Are Building A Civilized Space Here.7. The term Empire appears only in the second issue of the journal, published one year after the appearance of Negri and Hardts Empire. I return to this below.

    Works CitedAsor Rosa, Alberto. Le due societ: ipotesi sulla crisi italiana. Torino: Einaudi, 1977

    Balestrini, Nanni. Vogliamo tutto : une romanza. Roma: Derive Approdi, 2004.

    Balibar, Etienne. Droit de cit. Paris: PUF, 2002.

    ---. Violence et civilit. Paris: Galile, 2010.

    Bologna, Sergo. The Tribe of Moles. Italy: AutonomiaPost-political Politics. Spec. issue of Semiotext(e) 3.3 (1980): 36-61.

    Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.

    Harvey, David. The Right to the City. New Left Review 53 (September/October 2008): 23-40.

    The Invisible Committee. The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2009.

    Lefebvre, Henri. Droit la ville. Paris: Anthropos, 1968.

    Negri, Antonio. The Politics of Subversion. Trans. James Newell. Cambridge: Polity, 1989.

    Tiqqun. Introduction to Civil War. Trans. Alexander R. Galloway and Jason E. Smith. Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2010.

    ---. Tout a failli, vive le communisme! Paris: La Fabrique, 2009.

    Tronti, Mario. Operai e capitale. Torino: Einaudi, 1966.

    Wright, Steve. Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomi. London: Pluto Press, 2002.