Michael Hardt subverts ideas about political failure and revisits histories of liberation struggle

Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is co-author, with Antonio Negri, of the Empire trilogy and, most recently, Assembly. He is also the co-director of The Social Movements Lab. Toni Negri sadly died just recently, on December 16th, at the age of 90. He was a towering intellectual and political figure in modern Marxism and will be missed deeply for his radical philosophy and energy. In this conversation Michael talks about their collaboration on the Empire trilogy, what Toni meant to the process of learning together, and some of the spirited ways that they endeavoured to inform the conversation about the most effective and enduring ways to resist oppression. There’s no questioning the impact of the books Michael wrote with Negri, but for Hardt, it was all about learning. He recalls that Slavoj Zizek once said that this is the thing that most impressed him about each successive text: that the point was not to suggest that they had everything figured out in some airtight way, but to offer an invitation to rethink and rejuvenate democracy, and to wonder about why that term in particular seems to have this enduring power, despite so many efforts to inoculate its meaning and displace its place in politics. What I’ll take away from this discussion, maybe more than anything else, is the stuff I learned about how people learned. Listening again, I was struck by how crucial this part of movements is: the way we learn to be democratic subjects is through that transformative process of learning alongside others. It’s a process that can easily be corrupted and co-opted, but it is extremely important. The Subversive Seventies, Michael’s new book, was published in September by Oxford University Press. It’s the first book he’s written as a solo author in decades. For that reason, he says that he wanted it to be a different sort of exploration. There is much in it that is obviously historical, but it’s not historiographical. It’s about his own desires for insight into contemporary movements. We discuss, then, how the book communicates with the contemporary climate movement, what it might say about the struggle for survival and for freedom in Palestine. And the difference between the struggle for power and the struggle for liberation historically. Ultimately, this is in many ways a book that prioritizes participation over representation: universal participation in political decision-making rather than existing schemes of representation that leave power in the hands of the few. Hardt writes that, in this sense, “Liberation is not just emancipation— that is, releasing people from their chains in order to participate in the existing society. Liberation requires, in addition, a radical transformation of that society, overturning its structures of domination and creating new institutions that foster freedom.”