Chapter 1: Subjective Figures of the Crisis ... - Negri in English

Chapter 2: Rebellion against the Crisis
Today's neoliberal leaders—from their government offices and
corporate boardrooms, their media outlets and stock exchange
floors—constantly repeat to us that the crisis is dire and our
situation is desperate. We are on the Titanic, they tell us, and if
we want to be saved from the ultimate catastrophe, we have to
agree to worsen even further the situation of the indebted, the
mediatized, the securitized, and the represented. They promise
us that making things worse is our only salvation! Isn't it possible
to rise up and give voice to the indignation that seethes in all of
us when faced with this blackmail
All four of the dominated figures of contemporary' society
have the capacity to rebel and also to invert themselves and
become figures of power. This inversion is the result not of a
dialectical process but of an event, a subjective kairos that breaks
the relations of domination and overthrows the processes that
reproduce the figures of subjugation. This is not just theoretical
conjecture on our part, but rather a reality supported and
confirmed by the cycle of struggles that began in 2011, which
construct a series of instances of rebellion and resistance.
The neoliberal transformations of social, economic, and
political life have not simply disempow T ered and impoverished
the subjects they have produced. The impoverishment that
today's proletariat undergoes is not only, in fact, as Marx and
Friedrich Engels theorized, a lowering of wages and an
exhaustion of the material resources of individual and collective
life but also (and increasingly) the deprivation of our human
capabilities, especially our capacity for political action. Hannah
Arendt, for one, well grasped and anticipated, in the era of
triumphant capitalism, this generalized reduction of the potential
of human action. By following the recent phenomena we have
been describing, in fact, she could have deepened her
understanding of this process and her concept of action . This
concept is not only different from the heavy and deadening