Milan is a European metropolis like many others, but which are the real mechanisms with which the muscles and the brains of the varied productive multitude become folded to the requirements of the capital? Which are the sufferings, the contradictions, the desires that the various fragments of the multitude animate?

These are only some of the questions that we have placed since some years ago, we begun to place the metropolitan research problem. Some of us came from the previous political experiences, from the old cycle of fights of the 70's, and some had begun to make politics in the social centers, but we all understood the insufficiency of both these methods in front of the productive and social transformations that had redefined the structure of the metropolis and particularly the life of its inhabitants.

We had already made a lot of analysis on these transformations, and therefore the change was not a dark side to be discovered. We wanted in some way to enter in depth, to discover the connections, the knots, of the thousand modern productive groups.

Milan that we had known in the past, with its large factories and the workers' fights, was definitively buried. The amount of companies had been multiplied infinitely by endlessly producing small companies, which swam infinitely in the enormous productive sea. In this new Milan the various fragments of life became folded to the requirements of the production beyond the formal working hours.

In this context the vision of the metropolis together with the simple analysis of the productive-technical structure changed from difficultly realizable to absolutely insufficient in order to carry out a serious and useful research to develop conflict and fights. The first necessity was therefore to deconstruct the productive structure into the thousands of fragments that characterize it, to enter inside the fragmentation, as in a mixed-up mosaic in which it is tried to focus on separate pieces in order to define their exact locations and in order to redefine the mosaic in its entirety at last.

This job demanded the immediately constructed relationship to those subjects which were productive. They told us about their jobs, their life, their needs, their contradictions, their suffering, their desires and at the same time they were forced to look at themselves from the ouside, to notice that what is usually hidden, to decompose their own existence into thousand pieces and to characterize the continuous attempts, in the different moments, to appropriate the wealth included in their own work, communicativity, building of relations and the affective level. Often from the stories there appeared the exploitation characteristic to the society of control, much different from what characterized the old disciplinary structures: thinner, more pervasive, inconstant, sometimes rewarding, oscillating between exclusion and inclusion, sometimes intriguing, sometimes appropriative and intolerable.

Our research had to immediately encounter the methodological problem which was not secondary: our analysis could not be solely quantitative, but it had to privilige the qualitative aspect. Because of this, we tried to often build direct contacts to the productive subjects through interviews and narrations, rather than distribute questionnaires. Also where we had used the questionnaires (Italtel, McDonald's), we interviewed the workers in order to understand what to ask before distributing them.

Building relationships between people was therefore a priority in the research, and the relationships, as it is known, are never one-directional. Also we ourselves changed during the research process: in many occasions the image which we had concerning certain situations, has changed completely, because research cannot and must not be in service of one's own assumptions. It must help us to understand reality especially in order to place preconditions to change that reality. Research is not similar to photography, on the contrary it is the child of the art of the most dynamic transformations. Research is therefore an invaluable instrument of biopolitical action, which on the other hand tries to deconstruct the productive structures in order to interpret complexity, and on the other hand it tries to recumulate subjects by offering them means by which to be conscious about their existence and the tensions of transformation.

While during the fordist era the worker had such places and (s)he was in such common conditions, which allowed him to recognize himself as a collective subject, currently - in the era of fragmentation - the multitude is atomized, deconstructed, it is accustomed to live like a singularity, it is unable to exit through the walls of difference and the specifities, incapable to notice the various momentums of the exploitation and consequently the productive cycle in its entirety (at the utmost, the subject understands the exploitation included in the formal job). There is an enourmous disproportion: powerful and dark enemies appropriate your life and you are alone in approving this imperial normality, which is said to be the only and the natural alternative for you.

The challenge of research is therefore how to break from this dynamic of control, and how to find common characteristics within the multitude, not through artificial operations of political homogenization, but through the understanding of the various specificities and common elements. Today the research is continuing. Some interviews, narrations and questionnaires can be found in our web pages (http://www.ecn.org/gruink), but it cannot be asserted that the job is concluded, on the contrary it is open and in a stage of continuous evolution.

Recently we have been talking a lot about internal education work places and education in general. They are continuous and they concern life long training. Education is central, because it is located in the line drawn in water, which separates the collective formulation of knowledge from its capitalist use.

At the moment it is impossible to draw the conclusions about the research which we have been doing until now, but some common characteristics of the multitude are beginning to show their figure.

In addition to education, there are two aspects which refer, even if in various ways, to all the multiple productive subjects: a) the livelihood, which is becoming more and more insecure and insufficient; and b) the time that is less ans less free. Also those who have high salaries, even if they don't have any security concerning the salary in the future, are locked inside the work cycle, which takes away an unlimited amount of time from them.

THE UNCONDITIONED UNIVERSAL CITIZENSHIP INCOME

How to transform, therefore, the common characteristics found in the multitude into biopolitical paths and social demands? It is not by chance that in the first years of the 1970's the great labour fights demanded salary to be detached from productivity. Today, by estimating the transformations that have occurred in production, it is central to demand livelihood detached from work.

But what exactly is this universal unconditioned citizenship income? It is the amount of money which is enough for living and which is given to everyone: both to those that are at work and to those that aren't. Universal livelihood because it must be given to everyone regardless of where one lives and or where one is born. Unconditioned because it is totally separated from work and some other particular conditions.

Although universality as a concept is sufficiently describable, we must stop for a moment to ponder the concept of citizenship, which we are not accustomed to connect to residing in a certain area in a certain moment, but more to the prevailing juridical conception, which is based on the removal of rights through the heritage of blood or through the settling down of long duration (e.g. five years or more) in a certain country.

But what are the factors which make the citizenship income such an important demand? The first is the humanistic factor: everyone has the right to live according to one's value solely for the fact that one exists, regardless of one having a job or one having born in a certain place. The second factor has a syndicalist-demanding character. Today the profit and the exploitation exceed the formal working time and embrace our whole existence, our relations, our affections, our communication, our consumption; simply put we are not paid anything for this time. Therefore the citizenship income is also a particular salary for the extensive and stretching time, which exceeds the formal working time. Moreover to break the bound which makes work the only source of livelihood, means in practise to cut apart, including the roots, what nowadays seems to be the central form of blackmail, with which to force the majority of humanity, in the north and in the south, to approve of smaller and smaller wages and reducing the rights, in order to earn even a little. The effects of citizenship income can stop the global race for diminishing salaries.

The last factor, but not the least important, concerns time. To demand livelihood independent of work is also a part of the anthropological and cultural fight, which - beyond materiality - places the premises in order to liberate free human activity from the slavery of work, liberating our time in order to make us able to do something else.

Guaranteed income would enable a shorter working time or no work at all, offering the opportunity to construct something else, without the constant blackmail of livelihood. After all, today, the parasitic character of capital is more evident than ever: it is the material, intellectual, social, relational, communicative and affective work of the multitude which produces wealth. The capital is limited to command, to control, to direct this productive power through choices which are often devastating for the largest part of the humanity and to the planetary ecosystem, survival and the imperial command as its only goals.

To construct something else means to reappropriate this productive power, to place questions of what, how, where, when and how much to produce, also from the perspective of the bio- and ecologic necessities. Therefore it also means to liberate the power of social co-operation from the capitalist power and the imperial command. Therefore citizenship income refers to building this other, by simultaneously opening possibilities for its realization.

But who would pay for the citizenship income? This can sure be considered an often placed question, to which one cannot give an explicit answer. Only the construction of real movements will be able to supply answers to this question. To transform into the accountants of the capital, to try to find the compatibilities within the system, are not things which belong to us. It is up to the movements to demand rights and livelihood, and at utmost we can bring forward that in this planet, in the banks and in the stock exchange there is an enourmous amount of wealth circulating, and that this wealth belongs to a very small group today, thanks to the exploitation and death of many.

Obviously how to articulate one or sevelar fights for livelihood is a thing that brings us back to research, its results, its questions, and it is exactly on this level that research and guaranteed income go forward hand in hand.

THE SHAPES OF THE MOVEMENT

To build connections to the multitude and within the multitude means to place the old problem: that one of the organizational shapes. It is not by chance that in Italy this debate concerns also the post-Genova movement fighting for another content of globalization.

The old organizational shapes tied to an ideological group or a party have definitively faced their end, just like the concepts vanguard, masses and representationality. We should think about the organizational shapes from the needs of the productive subjects and not from the needs of political class and its internal mediation.

In particular to multitude it belongs as a basic characteristic that it is fragmented and deconstructed into a thousand different levels of social co-operation, and that it is controlled by capital in its bio-production process. Whatever the organizational shape, it cannot be based on univocality, because the conditions, feelings, languages and needs, which travel through the multitude, have more directions than one. Diversity is therefore the starting-point, just like the recognition of oneself in one's own singularity and the search for common features are necessities for building a common path. Therefore the movement can be nothing else than diverse, open to individuals and collective subjects. It should include and not to represent, because there lies its power. It must therefore exit from the internal logic among groups, from the operations of hegemony, from the organizational traditions that we have inherited from the passed years, it must know to reinvent new shapes of organization, by focusing our attention to multitude. Politics of the spectacular events, the game of representation, have often provoked strong attraction to our movements. However, Genova and the media administration after it, which has been brainless and shadowed by lies, has produced new necessities. It is most likely a rupture, which will deepen, and which in any case will return communication back to direct governance of the movements, and which will place as central the need to avoid closing oneself, to open oneself and to reappropriate, not mediated, but direct relationship to social subjects.

Exactly this seems to represent another important knot in the debate. Not only because it is necessary to discuss about the instruments of communication, variety of the languages, but also and above all because it means facing the central problem of the multitude: the communication. To move from information to communication means to move from unilateral transaction to reciprocity. Communication is exchange, entering relations, information and feelings, in which two or more subjects interact. Communication cannot be reduced to the relationship of the intellectual and the social subject or the wise vanguard and the stupid subject. By communicating we learn and grow together.

Paolo Punx