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

against national oligarchies, international corporations, or racist
elites, but even then they maintain a separation. The "identity" of
the movements is grounded in specific local situations, such as
the indigenous communities, the landless peasants who struggle
against the latifundios, the unemployed who demand a
guaranteed income, or workers who demand self-management of
production. But at the same time the movements maintain
cooperative or antagonistic relationships (or both
simultaneously) with the government so that they can act
autonomously on specific economic, social, administrative, and
constitutional issues.
This external relationship between movements and
governments has the power to set in motion a significant
transformation (and diminution) of the directive aspects of
government action. It could, in other words, force the
mechanisms of government to become processes of governance;
the sites on which different political and administrative wills are
engaged can become multiple and open; and the governing
function can dilute sovereign power to become instead an open
laboratory of consensual interventions and plural creations of
legislative norms. Most interesting here is the fact that the
multiplicity of encounters, and sometimes conflicts, maintains
nonetheless a deep political coherence of the governmental
process. Many aspects of an "institutionality of the common"
emerge here with clarity: the "destituent" force with respect to
the old colonial or bourgeois constitutions; the preeminence of
ethical and political programmatic aspects of a new constitution
(being "in another place"); the slow temporality and the
autonomy of political developments; the insistence on the
transparency of the institutions and communication; the
expression of implicit counterpowers, which are internal to the
constitutional process itself and already are ready to be wielded,
in case of emergency, against the causes of danger; the increased
protection of minorities; and the democratic decision-making
processes that guide and coordinate all these aspects.
Note that the plural operation of politics we are describing
here, with an open relationship between social movements and
governments, is not a form of populism. Populist governments
manage to combine the diverse expressions of social movements