Empire by Antonio Negri, Professor Michael Hardt

regional concerns in such a
    way that they could in no respect be linked together as a globally
    expanding chain ofrevolt. None ofthese events inspired a cycle
    ofstruggles, because the desires and needs they expressed could not
    be translated into different contexts. In other words, (potential)
    revolutionaries in other parts ofthe world did not hear ofthe
    events in Beijing, Nablus, Los Angeles, Chiapas, Paris, or Seoul
    and immediately recognize them as their own struggles. Further-
    more, these struggles not only fail to communicate to other contexts
    but also lack even a local communication, and thus often have a
    very briefduration where they are born, burning out in a flash. This
    is certainly one ofthe central and most urgent political paradoxes of
    our time: in our much celebrated age ofcommunication, struggles
    have become all but incommunicable.
    This paradox ofincommunicability makes it extremely difficult
    to grasp and express the new power posed by the struggles that
    have emerged. We ought to be able to recognize that what the
    struggles have lost in extension, duration, and communicability they
    have gained in intensity. We ought to be able to recognize that
    A L T E R N A T I V E S W I T H I N E M P I R E
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    although all ofthese struggles f
    ocused on their own local and
    immediate circumstances, they all nonetheless posed problems of
    supranational relevance, problems that are proper to the new figure
    ofimperial capitalist regulation. In Los Angeles, for example, the
    riots were fueled by local racial antagonisms and patterns of social
    and economic exclusion that are in many respects particular to
    that (post-)urban territory, but the events were also immediately
    catapulted to a general level insofar as they expressed a refusal of
    the post-Fordist regime ofsocial control. Like the Intifada in certain
    respects, the Los Angeles riots demonstrated how the decline of
    Fordist bargaining regimes and mechanisms ofsocial mediation has
    made the management ofracially and socially diverse metropolitan
    territories and populations so precarious. The looting ofcommodi-
    ties and burning ofproperty were not just metaphors but the real
    global condition ofthe mobility and volatility ofpost-Fordist social
    mediations.14 In Chiapas, too, the insurrection focused primarily
    on local concerns: problems ofexclusion and lack ofrepresentation
    specific to Mexican society and the Mexican state, which have also
    to a limited degree long been common to the racial hierarchies
    throughout much ofLatin American. The Zapatista rebellion, how-
    ever, was also immediately a struggle against the social regime
    imposed by NAFTA and more generally the systematic exclusion
    and subordination in the regional construction ofthe world mar-
    ket.15 Finally, like those in Seoul, the massive strikes in Paris and
    throughout France in late 1995 were aimed at specific local and
    national labor issues (such as pensions, wages, and unemployment),
    but the struggle was also immediately recognized as a clear contesta-
    tion ofthe new social and economic construction ofEurope. The
    French strikes called above all for a new notion of the public, a
    new construction ofpublic space against the neoliberal mechanisms
    ofprivatization that accompany more or less everywhere the project
    ofcapitalist globalization.16 Perhaps precisely because all these strug-
    gles are incommunicable and thus blocked from traveling horizon-
    tally in the form of a cycle, they are forced instead to leap vertically
    and touch immediately on the global level.
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    T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T
    We ought to be able to recognize that this is not the appearance
    ofa new cycle ofinternationalist struggles, but rather the emergence
    ofa new quality ofsocial movements. We ought to be able to
    recognize, in other words, the fundamentally new characteristics
    these struggles all present, despite their radical diversity. First,