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

unable to find work adequate to their education. Indeed in both
Tunisia and Egypt the loud calls to remove the tyrant made many
observers deaf to the profound social and economic issues at
stake in the movements, as well as the crucial actions of the trade
unions. The August fires of rioting in London also expressed
protest against the current economic and social order. Like the
Parisian rioters in 2005 and those in Los Angeles more than a
decade before, the indignation of Britons responded to a complex
set of social issues, the most central of which is racial
subordination. But the burning and looting in each of these cases
also responds to the power of commodities and the rule of
property, which are themselves, of course, often vehicles of racial
subordination. These are struggles for the common, then, in the
sense that they contest the injustices of neoliberalism and,
ultimately, the rule of private property'. But that does not make
them socialist. In fact, we see very little of traditional socialist
movements in this cycle of struggles. And as much as struggles
for the common contest the rule of private property', they equally
oppose the rule of public property' and the control of the state.
In this pamphlet we aim to address the desires and
accomplishments of the cycle of struggles that erupted in 2011,
but we do so not by analyzing them directly. Instead we begin by
investigating the general social and political conditions in which
they arise. Our point of attack here is the dominant forms of
subjectivity produced in the context of the current social and
political crisis. We engage four primary subjective figures—the
indebted, the mediatized, the securitized, and the
represented—all of which are impoverished and their powers for
social action are masked or mystified.
Movements of revolt and rebellion, we find, provide us the
means not only to refuse the repressive regimes under which
these subjective figures suffer but also to invert these
subjectivities in figures of power. They discover, in other words,
new forms of independence and security' on economic as well as
social and communicational terrains, which together create the
potential to throw off systems of political representation and
assert their own powers of democratic action. These are some of
the accomplishments that the movements have already realized
and can develop further.