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

Constituent Struggles
We consider to be constituent the struggles that are posed
on the terrain of the common and that not only express the
urgent need but also chart the path for a new constitutional
process. Some of the French and American founding fathers,
most notably Nicolas de Condorcet and Thomas Jefferson,
advocated that each generation must create its own constitution.
In line with that principle, today we must grasp the dramatic
break that is determined between the existing constitutional
institutions and the democratic needs that common sense
demands. When a long train of abuses and usurpations, as the
tradition teaches us, pursuing invariably the same object evinces
a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is our right,
it is our duty, to throw off such government and to provide new
guards for our future security. Today's struggles thus present,
first of all, destituent rather than constituent characteristics.
They must destroy the despotic effects left in us and our societies
through the exhaustion of the old constitutions.
The new struggles thus present a profound asymmetry with
what we can now call the ancien regime. Foucault insists that
power is always an action of one subject on another and that
power is thus always a relationship between command and
resistance. But when the movements develop with such
intensity, they often break away from preexisting relations and
find themselves, at that point, already on the other side. A
declaration of independence creates the real basis for a new
constituent process. The struggles express today, in other words,
the contingent result of political conflicts as well as an event, an
overflowing of desire and political proposition. The common
sense that dwells in the hearts and heads of the subjects who
conduct the struggles and imagine a new society has a
prescriptive value and the power to generate, animate, and
regulate new forms of life. Declaring their independence from the
ancien regime, they root themselves in a new ontological
condition and establish the circumstances under which more
equal, common, and sustainable relations can grow. This
constituent power is deeply embedded in the struggles, and these