Historical capitalism, general intellect, constituent power, communism

Historical capitalism, general intellect, constituent power, communism

This seminar by Antonio Negri will focus on the elaboration of a concept of the political that is suited for thinking the process of social constitution within the temporal horizon of the upcoming years.
The crucial question is as follows: How to think politics within capitalism? Or, more concretely, how to think an anticapitalist politics at a time when historical capitalism enters a phase of systemic chaos and global turbulence, a phase in which the following coincide: the crisis of the system's latest cycle of accumulation, which started up in the final third of the 19th century; the exasperation and exhaustion of this system's mechanisms of secular stabilization; and the failure of regulating and stabilizing forms for the continuing conflicts of the last fifty years? How to think politics in the present moment of the world capitalist economy given the historical modalities of existence of the political antagonistic subject and the hypothesis of general intellect as a dominant figure for the power of collective work? How to analyze the new centrality of the cultural and of the immediately political within the contemporary forms of subjectivity and sociality? What does the implementation of such a thesis entail for thinking the forms of present politics and the effective modalities of organization and intervention in the process of European construction and for thinking the definition of a new geo-economy and geopolitics antagonistic to a truly global reach and to themes distinctly anticapitalist? What relation are we to establish between the new forms of production and the new forms of political struggle, of constitutional construction and of revolutionary political practice?

This seminar is related to the exhibition How do we want to be governed? (MACBA, September 22 – November 14, 2004), which proposes a debate on the artistic field's potential within the political imagination.

Antonio Negri is professor of Doctrine of the State at the Universidad de Padua. He is the author of many books including: Constituitive Power (1994), Spinoza subversivo (2000), The State Form (2003), and Empire (2002), in collaboration with Michael Hardt.