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

want to appropriate your—or, really, our —wealth.
In certain periods, when the crisis strikes with its hardest
blows, for instance, which individuals have to withstand alone,
the will to resist arises with extreme and desperate force. Where
does it come from Many philosophers locate the origin of the
will in lack, as if in order to w T ant or act one must be focused on
w T hat is missing. But that's not true. The will is born positively
from the impulse to affirm a plenitude not a lack, the urge to
develop a desire. The will not to pay debts means not only
seeking w T hat we don't have, w T hat has been lost, but also and
more importantly affirming and developing w T hat we desire, w T hat
is better and more beautiful: the sociality and the fullness of
social relationships.
The refusal of debt, therefore, does not mean breaking
social ties and legal relationships to create an empty,
individualized, fragmented terrain. We flee those bonds and
those debts in order to give new meaning to the terms bond and
debt, and to discover new social relationships. Marx w T as being
realistic w T hen he spoke about money as the primary' social
connection in capitalist society. "The individual," he wrote,
"carries his social pow T er, as w T ell as his bond with society, in his
pocket." The refusal of debt aims to destroy the pow T er of money
and the bonds it creates and simultaneously to construct new
bonds and new forms of debt. We become increasingly indebted
to one another, linked not by financial bonds but by social bonds.
The subjective figures characterized by this social
interdependence have already been prepared and developed in
the new economic situation, hegemonized by biopolitical
production, by a life invested by valorization, and founded on the
cooperation of singularities. Cooperation and productive
interdependence are the conditions of the common, and the
common is now w T hat constitutes the primary' basis of social
production. Our social bonds, w T hich link us to one another,
become a means of production. In our interdependence, in our
commonality, we discover productivity and pow T er.
This is why, even though the flow T s of financial debt have
individualizing effects (along with suffering, desperation, and
pain—all of w T hich are doubled by our isolation), the new forms of
debt become ever more social and anti-individual, transitive, and