Theory engaged: Perspectives of discontent

Abstract

In their monumental work Empire, published in the late 1990s, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt dedicated the second chapter of the book to an analysis of the resistances and struggles unfolding in the new framework emerging after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first Gulf War. The general lines of this analysis are well known: Negri and Hardt use the analogy of the snake, as opposed to Marx’s mole, for describing the struggles of the multitude, which strike directly at the heart of the empire. This heart or centre is defined as emerging wherever the imperial order is disrupted or questioned. Significantly, however, only six such struggles are identified: the great strike of the French workers during 1995; the Intifada against Israeli state authority; the movement in Chiapas; the Los Angeles riots in 1992; the movements in South Korea in 1996; and the Tiananmen revolt in 1989. The contrast with today’s predicament is striking. It would, perhaps, be impossible to catalogue the various struggles that have emerged since the financial crisis of 2008. Something is strikingly different, at least quantitatively, in the post-crisis world and it is an urgent task for critical theory to try to capture this difference. Interventions and insurgencies gathered momentum in many parts of the world in the opening months of 2011. We have seen revolutions, oppression and Western military intervention in the so-called ‘Arab Spring’; sustained campaigns against public spending cuts, unemployment and the current economic settlement throughout Europe, most notably in Greece and Spain; unrest on the streets of English cities; and occupations around the world that claim to represent the 99 per cent in a fight against the inequities of late capitalism. Within each of these movements themselves, infinite complexities and differences have emerged. These events raise a myriad of issues, many that involve explicitly legal concerns, perhaps most