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A thought-provoking reconsideration of how the revolutionary movements of the 1970s set the mold for today's activism.
In his new book The Subversive Seventies, Michael Hardt investigates and draws forth the lessons from what he understands as a decade of "subversives."
In his Empire trilogy coauthored with Antonio Negri, he helped us understand a new global terrain of struggle. In this thought-provoking account, we see how the revolutionary movements of the 1970s set the mold for today's activism.
Faced with various progressive and revolutionary social movements, the forces of order—politicians, law enforcement, journalists, and conservative intellectuals—saw subversives everywhere.
From Indigenous peasant armies and gay liberation organizations, to antinuclear activists and Black liberation militants, subversives challenged authority, laid siege to the established order, and undermined time-honored ways of life. Police and military repression of the Left rose to extreme levels and took a wide variety of forms with varying degrees of lethal and nonlethal force, including disinformation campaigns, surveillance, infiltration, extralegal incarceration, targeted assassinations, mass “disappearances,” and torture.
Hardt writes, “It is tempting, given all the mystifications it evokes and the violence it justifies, simply to discard the term ‘subversive.’ But it is more useful to approach the term from the other side and embrace it. After all, those engaged in the progressive and revolutionary movements of the 1970s were in fact (and understood themselves to be) subversives. These activists were not satisfied with limited social and political reforms or partial alleviation of the suffering and exploitation of the subordinated if this meant leaving the foundations of the established order intact. Liberation was the core principle that guided a wide spectrum of movements, from women’s liberation and the liberation of colonized peoples to Black liberation, gay liberation, and proletarian liberation. Subversion and liberation thus go hand in hand, and only together can they make another world, a better world, possible.”
Need some tunes to get you in the mood for the event? Check out Michael Hardt’s Subversive Seventies playlist.
Michael Hardt's writings explore the new forms of domination in the contemporary world as well as the social movements and other forces of liberation that resist them. In the Empire trilogy—Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009)— he and Antonio Negri investigate the political, legal, economic, and social aspects of globalization. They also study the political and economic alternatives that could lead to a more democratic world. Their pamphlet Declaration (2012) articulated the significance of the encampments and occupations that began in 2011, from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park, and to recognize the primary challenges faced by emerging democratic social movements today. He teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University and is codirector with Sandro Mezzadra of The Social Movements Lab.
Jack Z. Bratich is professor in the Journalism and Media Studies Department at Rutgers University. He is author of On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death as well as Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture. He is also coeditor of Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality.
Praise for The Subversive Seventies
"Like putting on a pair of glasses that finally has the right prescription: the edges of the world become sharper and what seemed distant is suddenly near. A dazzling achievement." —Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and On Fire
"Damned or forgotten, obscured by the 'global Sixties' or by military dictatorships and incipient neoliberal hegemony, the revolutionary movements of the 1970s continue to speak to us. Michael Hardt takes readers on a breathtaking tour across those movements in different parts of the world, reactivating their political imagination for the needs of the present. A must-read book for anybody interested in a politics of liberation in its genealogy and its contemporary stakes." —Sandro Mezzadra, Professor of Political Philosophy, University of Bologna, and author of In the Marxian Workshops
"In offering his generous panorama of the militant movements of the 1970s, Hardt does us a remarkable service. He lets us revisit and rethink the past in a way that explains and unsettles our present. The watchwords of autonomy, ungovernability, and revolution that reverberated during that stormy decade did not wither on the vine. They are on the lips and in the hearts of young radicals today." —Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University.