From the end of national Lefts to subversive movements for Europe

di Antonio Negri

When we speak of the globalization of markets we also speak of a limitation imposed on the sovereignty of nation-states. In Western Europe, the essential error of national left-wing movements and parties [des gauches nationales] has been their failure to understand that globalization is an irreversible phenomenon.

Up until the fall of the Soviet Union, the US leadership succeeded in combining – with prudence, but also with manifest consistency – the national specificities of countries belonging to the Western alliances (and NATO, above all) with the continuity of classical imperialism, marshalling them together against ‘real socialism’. Ever since 1989, with the fall of the Soviet bloc, the ‘hard power’ of the United States has been replaced little by little by the ‘soft power’ of the markets: the freedom of commerce and money have subordinated the old instruments of power (the military and the international police), and financial power and the authoritarian management of public opinion have determined the field in which the new liberal actions that support market policies will be undertaken from now on. Neoliberalism has organized itself powerfully on the global level: today it manipulates the current economic and social crisis to its own advantage and can quite probably look forward to a radiant future… A democratic and peaceful transformation of the political foundations [assises] of neoliberalism is unimaginable on the global level – at least so long as no revolutionary ruptures take place.

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