Quotes from Michael Hardt

Events of resistance have the power not only to escape control but also to create a new world.

The intellectual is and only can be a militant, engaged as a singularity among others, embarked on the project of co-research aimed at making the multitude. The intellectual is thus not 'out in front' to determine the movements of history or 'on the sidelines' to critique them but rather completely 'inside.

Revolution does have to be violent precisely because the Pharaoh won't let you go. If the Pharaoh would let you go, the revolution won't have to be violent.

Power cannot survive when its subjects free themselves from fear.

Capital increasingly exploits the entire range of our productive capacities, our bodies and our minds, our capacities for communication, our intelligence and creativity, our affective relations with each other, and more. Life itself has been put to work.

But despite their poverty and their lack of material resources, food, housing, and so forth, the poor do have an enormous wealth in their knowledges and powers of creation.

Discussing, learning and teaching, studying and communicating, participating in actions—these are some of the forms of activism that constitute the central axis of the production of subjectivity. A plural ontology of politics is set in action through the encounter and composition of militant subjectivities.

Just as human productivity is masked in the figure of the indebted, in the figure of the mediatized resides mystified and depotentialized human intelligence.

Fear dominates. Thus come charismatic leaders to protect these classes and populist organizations to convince them they belong to an identity, which is merely a social grouping that is no longer coherent.

A new figure of the poor is emerging, which includes not only the unemployed and the precarious workers with irregular, part-time work, but also the stable waged workers and the impoverished strata of the so-called middle class. Their poverty is characterized primarily by the chains of debt. The increasing generality of indebtedness today marks a return to relations of servitude reminiscent of another time. And yet, much has changed.

Manifestos work like the ancient prophets, who by the power of their vision create their own people.

In all the occupations throughout the United States and around the world, from Rio de Janeiro to Ljubljana, from Oakland to Amsterdam, even in cases when they lasted only a short time, the participants experienced the power of creating new political affects through being together.

Physical proximity, of course, facilitates the common education of the affects, but also essential are the intense experiences of cooperation, the creation of mutual security in a situation of extreme vulnerability, and the collective deliberation and decision-making processes. The encampments are a great factory for the production of social and democratic affects.

This is not a manifesto. Manifestos provide a glimpse of a world to come and also call into being the subject, who although now only a specter must materialize to become the agent of change.