However, what about the complex network of material, legal, institutional, etc. conditions that must be maintained in order for the informational “multitude” to be able to function? So, when Naomi Klein writes: “Decentralizing power doesn’t mean abandoning strong national and international standards – and stable, equitable funding – for health care, education, affordable housing and environmental protection. But it does mean that the mantra of the left needs to change from ‘increase funding’ to ‘empower the grassroots’” [6] – one should ask the naive question: HOW? How are these strong standards and funding – in short, the main ingredients of the Welfare State – to be maintained? No wonder that, in a kind of ironic twist proper to the “cunning of reason,” Hardt and Negri end their Empire with a minimal positive political program of three points: the demand for global citizenship (so that the mobility of the working force under the present capitalist conditions is recognized); the right to a social wage (a minimal income guaranteed to everybody); the right to reappropriation (so that the key means of production, especially those of new informational media, are socially owned). The irony here is not only the content of these demands (with which, in abstractu, every radical liberal or social democrat would agree), but their very form – rights, demands -, which unexpectedly bring back into the picture what the entire book was fighting against: political agents all of a sudden appear as subjects of universal rights, demanding their realization (from whom, if not some universal form of legal state power?). In short (psychoanalytic terms), from the nomadic schizo outside the Law, we pass to the hysterical subject trying to provoke the Master by way of bombarding him with impossible demands…
http://www.lacan.com/zizblow.htm
