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Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

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"Multitude" by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri is a follow-up to the author's widely-acclaimed "Empire". In "Multitude", Hardt and Negri discuss change and the possibility of global democracy, which they define as "the rule of everyone by everyone". The book offers a unique vision of how such a future might be developing around us and futher rewards its readers with numerous insights and top-notch analysis in a highly readable text.

"Multitude" appears to have been written in part as a response to the criticisms of "Empire" as presented in the excellent book, "Empire's New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri" edited by Passavant and Dean. For example, "Multitude" takes a slightly different approach to the themes of U.S. exceptionalism, network power structures, violence and the politics of identity; all of these topics were critiqued at length in "Empire's New Clothes". Consequently, it appears that Hardt and Negri may have profited from this dialogue and it may also explain why "Multitude" is a more substantive and less theoretical book than "Empire".

Section One of "Multitude" is entitled "War". Hardt and Negri discuss the perpetual state of war as a means to maintain the capitalist world order and social hierarchy. Interestingly, the authors show how insurgencies and counterinsurgencies have both taken on the characteristics of flexible, postmodern production networks. Importantly, the anti-globalization movement is lauded as an example of how such decentralized and distributed networks can support an "absolutely democratic organization" whose emerging strength might yet constitute the "most powerful weapon against the ruling power structure."

Section Two is about "Multitude". The multitude is both plural and multiple, wherein people maintain their individualities but act based on common interests. Hardt and Negri posit that global production is made possible by "the commons" of language and communications and information networks. Patents, licenses and other tools to control the commons and appropriate wealth for private investors has hampered the productivity of the multitude, the authors believe, thereby creating a tension that might lead to revolution. To that end, recent events in Argentina are held out as examples of how new forms of collaborative democracy might emerge.

Section Three is entitled "Democracy". Hardt and Negri explain how the ecological and economic grievances of the multitude are routinely suppressed in favor of corporate interests. The authors endorse a number of reforms that might alleviate some of the worst excesses -- such as the Tobin Tax on currency trades, the easing of copyright laws and the forgiveness of third world debt -- but they go much further, suggesting that the time may be ripe for a "new Magna Carta", or a fundamental restructuring of relations between capital and labor. To that end, the authors envision an "open-source society" of collaboration characterized by the self-rule of the multitude and using the commons as the basis of social and economic production.

In my view, one of the key attributes of "Multitude" is its convincing analysis and description of today's post-democracy world. Hardt and Negri describe how the three major tenets of U.S. democracy -- the media, the separation of powers, and representation -- have been irreparably coopted by corporate power. This, of course, is an observation that has been made elsewhere but rarely with the penetrating analysis and skill that these intelligent authors bring to bear on the subject. If "Multitude" does nothing else than to serve to widen the discussion on this critically important topic, it will have made an important and lasting contribution.

However, I am less convinced that the open-source community envisioned by Hardt and Negri will spontaneously emerge as they have suggested. The disconnect between the aspirations of the multitude for shared peace and prosperity on the one hand and the brutal realities of hierarchical power structures on the other has existed for centuries. While one is certainly hopeful that the historic moment has changed and has made a revolution in human relations possible, the authors provide little in the way of guidance as to how the multitude might cross the divide. Still, "Multitude" serves as a thought-provoking and inspirational work that helps us understand the reasons why we need to move forward to a more peaceful and humane world, if not how to get there, and easily deserves a five-star rating. I highly recommend it to all.

Almost all the reviews that I read of the book "Empire" failed to recognize it as a philosophical text (e.g. they wanted charts and graphs or they wanted an easy read). But this point is important because a philosophical text is there to introduce you to a concept -- a new way of seeing and apprehending the world -- and to a new way of thinking. Fortunately this time around they say so immediately.

Multitude like Empire is a very rich and complex book interweaving different types of narratives in order to present a new way of thinking about our present. What has changed is the coherence and cohesion of the text. It is much more solid. It doesn't try to cover every single thing at the cost of the readers attention. But it is every bit as audacious as the first. It is quite daring and innovative, and for all that still completely analytically solid.

The major protesters are generally those who disagree that the world has changed. This is not necessarily a philosophical matter but an empirical one. Those people who disagree need to take issue with the thousands of economic, sociological and historical analyses that have charted these very changes. From there it is merely a matter of interpreting it all.

The second group of protestors to these books belong to this camp, who disagree with their interpretations of the events and their significance. What does the postmodernisation and globalisation of the global economy (for example) have to do with political struggle, for the labor movement etc.? It is here that this book shines above all its peers (and I do not hesitate in using such strong language). Whereas Empire gave cursory and rather abstract presentations of the present conditions political significance, Multitude is entirely invested with this presentation.

Reading this books to me seems that both Hardt & Negri took careful considerations of all the major trends of criticism and answered them in turn in a deep and very convincing fashion.

It is a shame that so many readers will concentrate and criticize their writings for its difficulty and terminology. I agree that in the first book these posed a lot of problems for those unfamiliar with many of the discourses, but if one understands that both books are books of philosophy and not simply another set of tired political polemics, then one should at least be prepared to make an investment in reading them. What one stands to get in return in terms of knowledge is I think highly worth it.

Negri and Hardt fail to deliver a new strategy for the Left in MULTITUDE, the follow-up to EMPIRE, their improbable sensation of 2000 on Harvard University Press. The idea of a decentered, heterogeneous "actor" replacing the old idea of a unified working class is nothing new. Negri has been developing that idea, along with the notion of the "immaterial worker" for some time. Activists in the global justice movement, a "movement of movements," probably already know what little is concretely proposed here and would learn more, I suggest, from the recently published GLOBALIZE LIBERATION, with contributions from a wide variety of activist/intellectuals, than from this volume.

I can't be too harsh when the authors are so clearly filled with desire and optimism about changing the world in the direction of our hopes and dreams. I must say, though, that I preferred Negri's writing before he teamed up with Hardt. His earlier works, including MARX BEYOND MARX and THE POLITICS OF SUBVERSION, were exciting to read, whereas the recent ones co-written with Hardt are a chore.

A philosophical footnote -- Negri is not part of the German idealist tradition, he is not "thinking in German neoplatonism," and he is most emphatically not a Hegelian dialectician. His influences include Spinoza (see his THE SAVAGE ANOMALY: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics), Machiavelli, of course Marx, and more recently, Foucault. The Foucault influence began in his joint writing with the late Felix Guattari, and continues in the project with Michael Hardt. Another recommendation, not so much for strategy as an "imagination pump" (Daniel Dennett's phrase) for activists, is Deleuze & Guattari's A THOUSAND PLATEAUS.

Hardt and Negri are probably the most celebrated political philosophers living today. Their previous book, Empire (2000), was a sometimes convincing, always provocative analysis of the global socio-economic and political system, which had the merit of remaining largely "high level" and theoretical, where the authors are most competent.

Unfortunately Multitude does not share the same merit. Hardt and Negri make a few interesting observations, for example on the current hegemony of immaterial labour (rendering the traditional notion of "proletariat" obsolete), and they provide an elementary yet useful application of Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "body without organs" to the political realm.

However, these modest accomplishments are outweighed considerably by rambling passages in which the authors discuss international finance (derivatives, etc.), lay anachronistic guilt trips on their readers over inequities between the North and South, and warmed-over analyses of the relationship between identity politics and social pluralism. Conspicuously absent is any consideration of ecology, which is looming ever larger as an issue in the 21st century.

Perhaps Hardt and Negri's most blinding oversight is a tendency to take globalization, and the world's evolution (or revolution) towards a "global democracy" for granted. Following September 11, 2001, this is a far from obvious prognosis. In fact, one could more plausibly argue, as John Ralston Saul did in the March 2004 issue of Harper's, that globalization is in the process of collapse, for better and/ or for worse.

It is very possible that certain regions of the world, such as Western Europe, continue to progress toward more "postmaterialistic" values (cf. Jeremy Rifkin's the European Dream), while America and the Muslim world duke it out in a low-level perpetual war (with attendant perpetual fear), which Benjamin Barber presciently labelled "Jihad vs. McWorld".

Readers who were stimulated by the high theory of Hardt and Negri's previous book, Empire, would be well-advised to take a pass on Multitude, perhaps in favour of Hardt's earlier theoretical work Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy. Those who are interested in a more down-to-earth leftist reading of our post-9/11 world might want to check out Emmanuel Todd's After the Empire (Après L'Empire).

Multitude is the much-anticipated follow up to Hardt and Negri's international bestseller Empire. In general Empire attempts to establish a firm contemporary understanding of the global order. The political theory of Empire addresses supranational sovereignty and its sources of legitimacy, while simultaneously analyzing the ways in which supranational sources maintain legitimacy through the legal process and how such is inextricably linked to the production of material and immaterial (knowledge, ideas, etc) production. As the previous sentence indicates, Empire is a dense and often times very difficult reading in political philosophy. Those who found Empire confusing or a difficult to understand will certainly find Multitude refreshing as the authors make it one of their clear and primary objectives to clearly define technical terms and philosophical concepts.

Multitude begins with the argument that war is no longer at the disposal of political powers (as it once had been) but rather war increasingly tends to define the very foundation of contemporary political systems. The authors address global warfare as an ontological (the nature of being) concept. Hardt and Negri argue that war "is becoming the primary organizing principal of society, and politics merely one of its means or guises" (p. 13). The authors insist that war has become a form of rule that not only controls the population but rather produces and reproduces all aspects of social life (see Michel Foucault).

The primary task of Multitude however concerns the conceptual rethinking of democracy. First, according to Hardt and Negri we need to understand that our current political order is not a democracy (in the true sense of the word) but rather more closely resembles what Rousseau refers to as an elective aristocracy. Hardt and Negri note that democracy is not unreasonable or an unattainable demand as the concept of the multitude (a class concept that refers to singularities that act in common) brings great hope to the future of democracy.

In order to implement a democracy and permanently rid the rampant corruption and disorder that plagues our current "democracy" the authors argue that the multitude needs to abolish sovereignty at a global level (e.g. the absolute destruction of authority). The authors also call for the abolition of private property by instituting what they refer to as a common. "The common does not refer to traditional notions of either the community or the public; it is based on the communication among singularities and emerges through the collaborative social process of production" (p. 204). The common moreover marks a new form of democracy, one that displaces sovereignty. With the rising of the common, continuity of modern sovereignty will ultimately be severed and in the Marxist sense demystify its core. The "new science of the multitude [is] based on the common" and when "these singularities act in common and thus form a new race, that is, a politically coordinated subjectivity that the multitude produces," a new humanity will result (p. 355-356).

Overall, I did not enjoy this book as much as Empire. I did find Hardt and Negri's careful assessment of criticisms levied against them (see Debating Empire a book edited by Gopal Balakrishnan) very interesting although not compelling. Perhaps the most problematic issue I have with Multitude is that the authors painstakingly denounce legitimate forms of violence for much of the first part of the book, however they come full circle by calling out to the multitude for the implementation of various forms of violence in the name of democracy. I do applaud Hardt and Negri for their faith and hopefulness in the human race, however their utopist vision is overshadowed by reality.

Key Terms

Empire: "the new form of global sovereignty . . . [that] includes as its primary elements, or nodes, the dominant nation-states along with supranational institutions, major capitalist corporations, and other powers" (xii).

Immaterial Labor: "labor that produces immaterial products, such as information, knowledges, ideas, images, relationships, and affects" (p. 65)

Biopower: "a form of rule aimed not only at controlling the population but producing and reproducing all forms of social life" (p. 13)

Biopolitical Production: "Biopower stands above society transcendent as a sovereign authority and imposes order its order. Biopolitical production, in contrast, is immanent to society and creates social relationships through collaborative forms of labor." (p. 94).

Multitude: "an internally different, multiple social subject whose constitution and action is based not on identity or unity (or, much less, indifference) but on what it has in common. . . . The multitude is the only social subject capable of realizing democracy, that is, the rule of everyone by everyone." (p. 100)

The Common: "an artificial result and constitutive basis . . . [that] configures the mobile and flexible substance of the multitude" (p. 349)



















In Multitude, Political theorists Hardt and Negri theorize a new form of global democracy and a new revolutionary vanguard that can bring such change about. Beginning with Marx's assumption that the mode of production determines subjectivity, Hardt and Negri argue that Marx's economic paradigm has shifted from the production of goods to the production of life itself, a process they term biopolitical production. In this new postmodern era of neoliberal capitalism, ontological warfare, supranational sovereignty, corporate transnational despondency, and the hegemonies of immaterial and affective labors have imploded modernist/dialectical thinking and established the prerequisites for a new way of thinking about revolutionary agency. To flesh out this complicated thesis it is necessary to analyze these four historical conditions in more detail and then discuss the new agential framework that Hardt and Negri term the multitude.
With the signing of the antiballistic missile treaty in 1972 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there is no longer any nation/state that poses a dialectical threat to America's exceptionalism, or its ability to intervene in the production of other societies. As a result, the United States, in tandem with other European superpowers, has launched a new form of warfare called biopower, a political strategy more concerned with producing global subjectivity and maintaining global hierarchy then fending off any sovereign foreign enemy. Abstract discourses (i.e., rhetoric) such as "the war on drugs" and "the war on terror" allow the United States to implement a regime of govermentality, or a strategy of policing subjects by managing their labor power and extracting from them surplus value (excess productive energies). The upshot of biopower is that war has achieved a new ontological character. No longer is warfare a temporal battle between sovereign nations, but instead an indefinite process of controlling, producing and expropriating life itself.
Just as nuclear weapons and biopower have disrupted the modernist understanding of warfare, the emergences of supranational institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have challenged the modernist conceptualizing of nation/states. In the past, capitalist nation/states functioned as sovereign entities and had to promote their mode of production through force, coercion, or imperialism. With the rise of supranational institutions, however, the valorization of capitalism no longer depends on any unilateral or multilateral nations. Because supranational institutions stand outside of representational politics, it is difficult, if not impossible, to link the hegemony of capitalism to any centripetal source of power. The IMF's ability to loan money to developing nations and the World Bank's capability to build nations under the discourse of foreign aid, reify the ontological nature of capital and its ability to yoke together all social subjects under a common capitalist identity. Such institutions also demonstrate the pernicious consequences of biopower, ossifying the current (amorphous) global hierarchy by creating an indefinite state of debt and poverty.
While supranational institutions have occluded the question of nation/states, multinational corporations have broken down the distinctions between public and private, appropriating all forms of life by transmuting material products into immaterial knowledges, ideas, and codes. Hardt and Negri discuss "the Green revolution," and other biological reforms, as a means of illustrating the way life forms can be owned by private corporations. With the ruling of two Supreme Court cases in the mid 1980s, for example, genetically altered life forms have been deemed patentable so long as they are a product of human ingenuity. What such a trend depicts for Hardt and Negri is that a new era neofeudalism is afoot. Seeds, water, and labor, materials that at one point were all part of the common (i.e., everyone), are now being expropriated by corporations and transformed into private knowledges and codes.
The expropriation of life by transnational corporations provides a segway for discussing the final historical variables of Hardt and Negri's project: immaterial labor and affective labor respectively. Immaterial labor signifies how knowledge, communication, and ideas have become integral to the (re)thinking of labor and production in late capitalist society. The example of genetically modified seeds listed above, for example, demonstrates the way products produced through material labors are becoming interchangeable with immaterial codes. Not only have the products produced become immaterial, however, but the process of production itself has also become immaterial. The shift from the Fordism of the late 1920s to the postFordism of the 1980s has made networking, branding, and communication central to the laboring experience. In an international economy where products are created transnationally and in a climate where a label is as important as the product itself, networking and communication become integral to the distributing and producing of most commodities.
As labor takes an immaterial turn, affective labor becomes exigent as well. Affective labor illustrates the way that labor in a late capitalist society increasingly relies on human mobility, emotion, and communication to achieve particular objectives. The service industry, for example, one of the more common occupations in the postmodern era, depends not so much on industrial labor as it does on the worker's ability to manipulate and solicit particular affects and emotions. Similarly, the instability of the labor market, caused by the perpetual outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries, has made participants in the labor market flexible and mobile, a shift that signals a new way of thinking about work and identity. Even the domain of consumption, a realm typically isolated from the arena of labor practices, is also becoming inseparable from labor when viewed from the perspective of affects. The consumption of movies, books, and television dramas, for example, cannot achieve their results without soliciting people's emotions and identities.
What affective labor and immaterial labor point to specifically, is that labor can no longer be viewed dialectically, or as a tension between productive and unproductive labor. Under the logic of biopolitical production, the new economic paradigm of late capitalist society, all labor shares a common exploitative element. Every single laboring subject, whether consuming or producing, is exploited by the parasitic nature of capitalism and robed of their living labor so that empire, an amalgam of multinational corporations, aristocratic elites, and political regimes can generate surplus value.
It is from this common starting point, this new era of biopolitical production, that Hardt and Negri propose an alternative strategy for rethinking revolutionary agency. Although ontological warfare, supranational sovereignty, corporate transnational despondency, and the hegemonies of immaterial and affective labors have created terrifying conditions for a vast majority of the world, they have also, for the first time in human civilization, have connected human beings in ways that were never previously possible.
In the Hobbesian premodern era, hierarchical differences were central to the theorizing of society. All citizens obeyed the asymmetrical power of the monarch and disparities were visibly maintained and respected. In the Hegelian modern era, in contrast, unity became the dominant mode of theorizing about society. Consensuses and enlightenment were the teleologies of this time and transcending differences were central to such a perspective. In the postmodern era of biopolitical production, however, neither difference nor unity can adequately describe the current state of thinking. Instead, only a new metaphor of simultaneous unity and difference (see also Hall, 1985) can offer a framework for (re)theorizing revolutionary agency. This reality, for Hardt and Negri, means that dialectical models of agency, such as Aune's (1994) distinction between structure and struggle, are no longer tenable. At the same time, however, it also means that associating Hardt and Negri's project with the relativistic premodern era is not a tenable practice either (p. 37) (see also, Cloud, Aune, & Macek, 2006).
What the postmodern era teaches Hardt and Negri is that all models of theorizing instrumental agency (whether dialectical, hierarchical, or aesthetic) are no longer relevant. The exploitation of everyone by late capitalist society (i.e., empire) means that "the multitude . . . is not only a model for political decision making but also tends itself to become political decision making" (p. 339). The becoming common of exploitation and communication, in other words, means that revolution and antagonism are immanent. "From this perspective, the crisis of capitalism is now, not in some unspecified future awaiting the revolutionary plans of the party" (Greene, 2006, p. 88).
Yet while agency in the postmodern era must be fundamentally reconceptualized so too must one's definition of warfare. In the age of nuclear weapons and global capitalism, dialectical warfare is no longer a valid option. Instead, the multitude must wage a war against war, or a battle that takes place more in the form an exodus (a refusal to partake in capitalism). The project of the multitude, then, becomes not one of forming instrumental class based oppositional blocs, but awaking the revolutionary agency that is dormant in all of us. Perhaps Marx's dream of escaping the alienation of labor is still an actual possibility.

I loved the book and I found it very interesting. Although, as usual there are some critisim but overal it has my vote as an interesting book.
If you want to have a better perspective on what has been going on in the world, especially the events that have started in middle east to the one in Wall Street then you need to read this book.

This book took me back to my schooldays in the old Soviet Empire (not a capitalist one, and yet in a perpetual state of war both internally and externally). More specifically, to my mandatory propaganda classes run by highly trained and experienced Soviet counter-intelligence officers. This book is so smartly written it would make them proud! Why? Let me quote from memory "To get people to see things your way and join your cause follow few basic but very important rules: Speak to their instincts and their hearts; not to their minds. Attempts to reason with your targets at the intellectual level are bound to trigger critical thinking, at which point you as good as lost them. So do not engage in discussions and do not state facts to advance your cause, i.e. do not follow "there is X and there is Y therefore this is A". This makes your targets focus on X and Y which they may question, they may add a Z, and challenge your arrival at A as manipulation of facts. Which it needs to be - only smarter. Therefore, present targets with statement A first and win over their hearts and instincts. Then present facts X and Y selectively "to illustrate". Trick is that by then your targets will have already bought A and will happily accept X and Y as "factual justification". Of course they are only self-rationalizing why they bought your A in the first place, but this is exactly what you need to make A stick. Always use short simple sentences, big numbers, bigh words, bright colors, make sweeping statements... It may be counter-intuitive, but your targets will always have a propensity to believe big lies than small facts. And once they belive, they will be able to explain away anything that does not fit into their belief. This is how you set in motion self-sustaining process and know that you have succeeded." And so it goes. And this is what this book does, and this is why it is so effective. Have fun reading it! And remember Fox Mulder - "I want to believe" :)

If you liked Empire, you'll love Multitude. The authors and reviewers alike speak of Multitude as a follow up to Empire, but I think something very different is happening here. Hardt and Negri have pushed and pulled each other forward over a vast and forbidding territory, and in Multitude they have attained a height/depth of perception well beyond Empire. If you are attempting to learn your radicalism, or inform your progressivism, through Hardt and Negri, then you may see Multitude as continuing from and expanding Empire, and you may also join the chorus bemoaning the perceived digressiveness and discursiveness of both books. But what we actually have here are two attempts at the same fateful book: where Empire was the best try we had at the time, Multitude now succeeds. Where the digression in Empire circled around the feeling of our world-cultural hematopoiesis, the discursion in Multitude captures it.

Fukuyama attempted to deal with Multitude in the July 25th NYT Book Review, and either utterly failed at, or purposefully decided to avoid, addressing the book qua philosophy. At this point in his apologizing for economists, it is hard to imagine that Fukuyama's name has ever been mentioned in the same breath as Hegel, or that he has ever actually read any of the German Idealists;- whereas with Hardt and Negri, we almost have that level of man among us again. For Fukuyama, history has indeed ended, because he has stopped feeling it and can now only move around his darkened signifiers. For Hardt and Negri, and for those who have read, listened, and felt their way into the great becoming that is world history, we are indeed not at its end, but at its very beginning.

The chief problem with this book is that the English language, as a field of common meaning, is not up to handling this level of thought anymore. (E.g., the very British cheery insufficiency of George Monbiot's 'Manifesto for a New World Order'.) Hardt and Negri wrote Multitude in English, but were thinking in German, that neoplatonic lego of a language. So, if you consider yourself progressive but can't get the feeling and sweep of Multitude, then trash your TV, stop reading anything written after 1930 for a few years, then come back to it. You will find you have become allergic to CNN, but you will also find that - finally - you can *feel* what the world and her history are all about.

michael hardt said that the purpose of his book(s) (ie "empire) is a construct a new political vocabulary. "multitude" is s postmodern marxist view of the end of history as envisioned by kant and hegel and other enlightenment visionaries.
first, it describes the changing state of the world in what hardt & negri (h&n) calls the multitude. the multitude is the response to the new dominant narrative of the "empire," vast network of varied entities that forms the new logic of rule, or sovereignty, which has created wide spread lack of representation, injustice, inequality, and violence. the new vision of the multitude will work to create what h&n calls "biopolitical" production, the networking working to create a social, political, and economic life together, which becomes the goal itself. thus, the old marxist understanding of production is not material or capital but "biopolitical" social order, or a network of people called the multitude. do h&n succeed in creating a new political vocabulary for a new political paradigm? i think so.