Big Political Science and Sociology: Constituent Power as an Institution of the Public

 
16.09.2015
 
Department of Political Science

On March 28th, 2014 prominent Italian professor Antonio Negri gave a presentation as part of a conference in the Department of Political Science and Sociology. Professor Negri is the author of the books Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, among others.

Antonio Negri lectured on the concept of constituent power. He began with the observation that the concept, formed in the Early Modern Period, needs rethinking. For this, we must resist the legal interpretation of constituent power, which represents it as pure solution, or an empty assertion of power as such. Indeed, by its own meaning constituent power is the power of the creative, inventing new forms of social life.

Constituent power is power borne from below, and is based on a desire to live together. Such power will always remain external to law and opposes total integration into the normative order.

Negri identified three approaches to constituent power:

1. Institutionalism (the main representative of this approach is G. Jelinek. Here law is understood as the gradual accumulation of institutions). In institutionalism, constituent power is discussed as a primary impulse.

2. Normativism (Hans Kelsen, law is a rational system of norms). Here, constituent power is absorbed by a system of norms. 

3. The American Legal School (Bruce Akerman). According to this theory, constituent power is latently present in the current law, and courts have the ability to update it.

Professor Negri believes, however, that in all these approaches constituent power lacks independent force. Thus a question arises: what does it now mean to create law, and how is it possible to preserve constituent power?

According to Negri, society’s submission to the command system of capitalist corporations and the division of labor on a global scale has made our life a social factory. Revenue is extracted from the very production and reproduction of life. In such a situation, the only constituent power is money. Labor and citizenship are woven up in the merger, but an even greater antagonism is developing between labor and capital. The nation state has weakened along with the forces that previously held back the unrestrained expansion of capital. Thus capital is the relationship of commanding authoritarian power and the labor power that resists it. Capital subordinates living labor while simultaneously extending a system of social relations, thus creating multiple systems of control that cannot be centrally managed. From this Negri concludes that now constituent power is found not outside society, but is inherent to it. An example of such a transformation is the specific character of constituent power in contemporary Latin America. Here, changes to authoritarian institutions change gradually but modifications to the political structure occur simultaneously with modifications to the social structure. The autonomy of the political dissolves in social movements.

Negri identifies three elements of contemporary constituent power: temporality, the rejection of state fetishism (the development of bio-politics) and plurality. The majority of movements are organized into a permanent counter-power and form a new type of government and new forms of social and political subjectivity. These social movements (Indignados, for example) present themselves as a new form of life, creating society in the framework of capitalism. Characteristic of these movements is the struggle against private ownership (against finance capital) or the struggle against debt. Currently, debt is what once was a salary at a factory. If previously the struggle for higher wages led to a consolidation of workers, then now the struggle against debt has become a tool for political subjectivity. Productivity grows namely from day to day cooperation: this network cooperation also composes societal ontology that opposes public or state ontologies. The simple fact of the realization that today the formation of capital is based on social, cognitive and communication labor means that the conception of constituent power has already begun. Negri believes that it is necessary to articulate political discourse in accordance with the new conditions of exploitation. This can succeed through new social movements and the creation of alternative social power, such as the occupy movement. A new political subject is formed in these movements—a majority that is not just a mass, but a collection of individuals.

Negri concluded the lecture by recalling his research on Spinoza. Referring to the philosopher, he underlined the fact that the majority is not only capable of unity, but is always a zone of struggle and conflict.

Olga Bashkina

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