LITTLE BROTHER BREAKS THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT

Abstract

In 1976 Antonio Negri wrote an introduction to the Italian translation of Jerry Rubin's Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven, the book that followed his iconic Yippie manifesto ‘Do it’ (Fallo! In Italian). Out of print for some time, the former (with Negri's introduction) was reprinted in 2009. Negri appears to be interested in the transformation of a culture that had flourished with the Yippies, advocating, and coagulating into, new forms of actions, notions of labour, sexuality and production of subjectivity through technological resistance (online and offline hacking), and later morphed into those young upwardly-mobile professionals known as Yuppies. What is the Italian equivalent of the American Yippies? Many participants in the Movement of 77 like the Metropolitan Indians engaged in a myriad of small illegalities quite similar to those technically described in Yippie newsletters (offline hacks). The new publication of this book, along with Negri's introduction, does not come as a surprise. In fact, it appears to establish a connection between those early years of struggles and social unrest and the global identity and political molecularization and dissipation that characterizes the later years. This text is comprised of two parts: the first is a translation of Negri's introduction to Rubin's book. The second critically examines that introduction, relocating it into the semiocapitalist context described by Franco Berardi (Bifo). We believe that this operation helps identify continuities between the underground movements that swept Italy in the mid-1970s, the rise and fall of the Yippies, and a number of dynamics that characterize today's social and political articulations. In particular, Negri's apparent interest in the Yippies and their transient passage tightening up a number of elements that characterize the current hybrid status of labour, the dispersed multiplicity of the political, and the formation of heterogeneous alliances among unlikely bedfellows. Finally, rereading Negri's Introduction allows us to reassess the relationship between himself and Bifo.