Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please improve this article if you can. (August 2006)

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire is a book written by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt published in 2004. It is a sequel to their 2000 Empire.

1 Context
2 The book itself
3 Notes
4 External links

[edit] Context

Empire analyzed the formation of a new global geopolitical order, an apparently chaotic set of controls and representative organisations which, on closer inspection, forms a pyramidal power-structure that is composed of three progressively broader tiers—a replica of Polybius’ description of Roman government, hence the denomination ‘Empire’. At its narrow monarchic pinnacle we find the only remaining superpower, the United States, followed closely by a handful of other nation-states—roughly, those represented in the G8, which together control the primary global monetary instruments—and a handful of supranational institutions such as the WTO, NATO, and the IMF. In the second, aristocratic, tier reside transnational capitalist corporations and the general set of sovereign nation-states. The base of the pyramid is formed by the democratic-representational comitia—the United Nations General Assembly, religious organisations, the media, and Non-governmental organizations, which together are supposed to represent the People in the global constitution.

It is in this third tier that, albeit indirectly, the multitude appears as the Other of the People: “The democratic forces that in this framework ought to constitute the active and open element of the imperial machine appear rather as corporative forces, as a set of superstitions and fundamentalisms, betraying a spirit that is conservative when not downright reactionary. […] This limited sphere of imperial ‘democracy’ is configured as a People (an organized particularity that defends established privileges and properties) rather than as a multitude (the universality of free and productive practices).”^[1] It is the role of Empire to mould the multitude, via mechanisms of representation, into a People, to transcendentally confiscate the ostensibly chaotic and thus ‘dangerous’ immanent force of the multitude and reconfigure (or reterritorialize) its multiplicity into one will. Empire, Hardt and Negri write, is an apparatus of capture that lives off the vitality of the multitude.

The multitude plays a prominent part in Empire, and not in the least for its revolutionary potential to establish what Baruch Spinoza called an absolute democracy, to subvert the alleged post-disciplinary societies of control and its concomitant biopower, in short to attack post-industrial capitalist hegemony with effective weaponry.

Hardt and Negri conclude their analysis with a chapter that focuses directly on the multitude and end with an optimistic outlook:

"Certainly, there must be a moment when reappropriation [of wealth from capital] and self-organization [of the multitude] reach a threshold and configure a real event. This is when the political is really affirmed—when the genesis is complete and self-valorization, the cooperative convergence of subjects, and the proletarian management of production become a constituent power. […] We do not have any models to offer for this event. Only the multitude through its practical experimentation will offer the models and determine when and how the possible becomes real."^[2]

[edit] The book itself

The rapid growth of the anti-globalisation movement which showed its teeth in the large protests in Seattle in 1999 and in Genoa in 2001, along with the creation of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, also in 2001, seemed to substantiate the optimistic outlook at the end of Empire. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 seem, however, to have worked as a pivotal point with respect to this development—offering, one might cynically conclude, the dwindling Empire, in a Hobbesian fashion, the chance to defend itself against the multitude through the production of fear.

Multitude addresses these issues and as such picks up the thread where Empire has left of. In order to do so, Hardt and Negri argue, one must first analyse the present configuration of war and its contradictions. This analysis is performed in the first chapter, after which chapters two and three focus on multitude and democracy, respectively.

Multitude is not so much a sequel as it is a reiteration from a new point of view in a new, relatively accessible style that is distinct from the predominantly academic prose style of Empire. Multitude remains, the authors insist, despite its ubiquitous subject matter and its almost casual tone, a book of philosophy which aims to shape a conceptual ground for a political process of democratisation rather than present an answer to the question ‘what to do?’ or offer a programme for concrete action.