Quote: Knowledge Production in Movements

All we have just said ... however has also been reached via a series of different routes through the discussions internal to the movements of the multitude in the last few decades. One of these routes took off from the crisis of the industrial workers' movements and their scientific knowledges in the 1960s. Intellectuals within and outside the factories struggled to appropriate the process of knowledge production from the party hierarchy, developing a method of 'co-research' to construct together with workers alternative knowledges from below that are completely internal to the situation and intervene in the current power relations. Another route has been forged by professors and students who take their work outside the universities both to put their expertise at the service of social movements and to enrich their research by learning from the movements and participating in the production of knowledge developed there. Such militant research is conceived not as community service -- as a sacrifice of scholarly value to meet a moral obligation -- but as superior in scholarly terms because it opens a greater power of knowledge production. A third route, which has developed primarily among the globalization movements in recent years, adopts the methods of 'co-research' developed experimentally in the factories and applies them to the entire terrain of biolpolitical production. In social centres and nomad universities, on Web sites and in movement journals, extraordinarily advanced forms of militant knowledge production have developed that are completely embedded in the circuits of social practices.

-- Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, p. 127 (references in original)