Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

The world-renowned authors of the international best-seller Empire follow with an astonishing, politically energizing manifesto that argues that some of the most troubling aspects of the new world order contain the seeds of radical global social transformation

With Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri established themselves as visionary theoreticians of the new global order. They presented a profound new vision of a world in which the old system of nation-states has surrendered much of its hegemony to a supranational, multidimensional network of power they call empire. Empire penetrates into more aspects of life over more of the world than any traditional empire before it, and it cannot be beheaded for it is multinoded. The network is the empire and the empire is the network.

Now, in Multitude, Hardt and Negri offer up an inspiring vision of how the people of the world can use the structures of empire against empire itself. With the enormous intellectual depth, historical perspective, and positive, enabling spirit that are the authors' hallmark, Multitude lays down in three parts a powerful case for hope. Part I, "War," examines the darkest aspects of empire. We are at a crisis point in human affairs, when the new circuits of power have grown beyond the ability of existing circuits of political sovereignty and social justice to contain them. A mind-set of perpetual war predominates in which all wars are police actions and all police actions are wars-counterinsurgencies against the enemies of empire. In Part II, the book's central section, "Multitude," they explain how empire, by colonizing and interconnecting more areas of human life ever more deeply, has actually created the possibility for democracy of a sort never before seen. Brought together in a multinoded commons of resistance, different groups combine and recombine in fluid new matrices of resistance. No longer the silent, oppressed "masses," they form a multitude. Hardt and Negri argue that the accelerating integration of economic, social, political, and cultural forces into a complex network they call the biopolitical is actually the most radical step in the liberation of humankind since the Industrial Revolution broke up the old feudal order. Finally, in "Democracy," the authors put forward their agenda for how the global multitude can form a robust biopolitical commons in which democracy can truly thrive on a global scale. Exhilarating in its ambition, range, and depth of interpretive insight, Multitude consolidates Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's stature as the most exciting and important political philosophers at work in the world today.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Sociology, History, Academic

448 pages, Hardcover

First published October 18, 2004

About the author

Michael Hardt is an American literary theorist and political philosopher perhaps best known for Empire, written with Antonio Negri and published in 2000. It has been praised as the "Communist Manifesto of the 21st Century."
Hardt and his co-author suggest that what they view as forces of contemporary class oppression, globalization and the commodification of services (or production of affects), have the potential to spark social change of unprecedented dimensions. A sequel, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, published in August 2004, details the notion, first propounded in Empire, of the multitude as possible locus of a democratic movement of global proportions.
The third and final part of the trilogy, Commonwealth, appeared in the Fall of 2009.

Reviews

[Jogar01 · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I took out of this book was Hardt and Negri's proposal that industrialism has passed and in turn, it's antagonistic classes have perished. They argue that the struggle is no longer between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The struggle is one between the multitude and Empire, that is, it's a struggle of all for the survival of the species and for the recovery of the common.
The authors suggest that industrial labor has lost it's societal hegemony and in turn has been replaced with affectionate labor. That is, labor that does not necessarily produce anything other than human affection and uses technilogy innovation to fulfill it's labor. For example, the worker at McDonald's, who in other times would have not been deemed as a potential member of an antagonistic class, engages in affactinate labor. He does not produce anything other than engage in daily human interaction and dispenses orders on a touchscreen. According to the authors, the multitudes potential for success over it's anatagonist is in affectionate labor, that is, in the daily interaction of human beings and the use of technology.
The authors do not offer a recipe for countering Empire but leave good notes for further study and practice. Towards the end they propose a revisit to the republican and federalist ideals of the American Founding Fathers (i.e. Madison and the federalist papers) and mixing those ideals with Lenin's ideas about the state. The multitude's livelihood and survival depends on deepening the struggle for democracy and the defense of the Commons.

[Alex Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

The basic foundation in this book comes from Marx, that is to say, the form of labor -- forces of production -- shape subjectivity. Unlike Marx however, Hardt and Negri take the position that labor has already attained subjectivity. They dub this collective subjectivity as the multitude, not as a unity but as a collective resistance against the control of production that upper classes utilize. So while you can draw an analogy between communism as utopia, espoused by Marx and how Hardt and Negri take radical democracy of the multitude as utopic, the main difference from Marx isn't democracy vs communism, it's the concept that subjectivity is also produced by the mode of labor.

So to reconnect the dots, Hardt and Negri take a post-Marxist position that is analogous to Marx. Using the figure of the double articulation as a way of deploying meaning, the first articulation is the mode of labor to constitute subjectivity. The second articulation for Hardt and Negri is the state apparatus, the nest of multinational corporations that over grids national boundaries while defining the class relations within those national boundaries. Hardt and Negri envision a second articulation that follows the first articulation closely, in order to divide resource allocation more evenly.

They don't pretend to know how to do this, this book is only meant to define the problem further.

So to follow their form, they do fall under the rubric of post-modernism as an accelerated form of modernism, because they take the populous multitude as having coherency within each separate identity, even if there is no coherency within a larger collection because such coherency creates a bottle neck that would centralize control, disrupting most positions within the multitude by "representing" them.

In this sense, their deploy is anti-representation, yet it also uses the political-social episteme as a model for itself. One assumes that we will not encounter Baurdillaridian simulacra at the point, for Hardt and Negri like Marx assume that the subjectivities of the multitude are authentic and not a reflexive backflow informed by the second articulation but wholly originary merely at the first level in-itself for-itself.

They don't address this last point. Coached in the terms I just put it, their assumption becomes problematic and unstable, for as they point out, peace in the center requires expansive control of the territory directly outside. This seed is how they point out Empires start. And isn't in this example, a singularity that would rule the multitude? They also don't address this in the book; how a multitude could live with itself. I suppose their reach is to get away from abstract philosophy, but considering that their assumptions are centered from philosophy, it feels like a bit of a blind spot.

[Alex Khlopenko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mandatory reading for humanity

[Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

(What follows are notes on the most interesting ideas set out in the book, not properly integrated into a review.)
The authors’ previous book, Empire, had argued that the theory of imperialism was no longer applicable to an analysis of contemporary capitalism. The current situation was better characterised as ‘network power’ which includes, along with the dominant national powers, supranational institutions, major capitalist corporations, and “other powers.” But there is no evidence that the interests within this network align with a dominant imperial interest which can dictate courses of action down the line. Rather the network is an assembly of hierarchically divided forces, often split along regional, national and local lines. The imperial component, to the extent it exists at all, is only a tendency – not a completed project.
One of the manifestations of its incompleteness is the role that war plays in regulating activity within the network. They see it as functioning as the “primary organising principle”, manifested not just in armed combat but also in the rhetoric of day-to-day politics, with its war on poverty, war on drugs, and, presumably, war on Covid-19, etc. As they put it, “War has become a regime of biopower” – a “form of rule aimed not only at controlling the population but producing and reproducing all aspects of social life.” In performing this function is has two aspects: the first is that of war as traditionally understood as conflict between nations; the second war as police action. Under this the underpinning purpose of war shifts from ‘defence’ to ‘security’, and security requires that citizens come under closest scrutiny as potential enemies of one sort or another.
The ideas of ‘networks’, ‘biopower’ – the latter understood as power exercised to recreate the conditions of social life - are fused with an interpretation of the changes undergone to the processes of capital accumulation during the neoliberal period. In early periods the sectors which where dominant in the production of profits were those that produced material commodities. Hardt and Negri place emphasis on the modern production of intangible goods, like ideas, knowledge, notional possession of patents and other assets as being the principal mechanisms for channelling surplus value to the capitalist class. An effect of this has been to reduce the importance of that section of the working class most directly engaged in the manufacturing or processing of material goods to the functioning of the system. The hegemonic position of this ‘old’ working class, expressed through their trade unions and social democratic parties, has accordingly been reduced. Their big claim is that immaterial labour has now become hegemonic in qualitative terms, and is now imposing this tendency on other forms of labour and society itself. “Immaterial labour, in other words, is today in the same position that industrial labour was 150 years ago….. Just as in that phase all forms of labour and society itself had to industrialise, today labour and society have to informationalise, become intelligent, become communicative, become affective.“
This process of ‘informationalising, becoming intelligent, etc, is no longer imposed on labour by the dictates of capital (ie as when Fordism imposed a radical separation between thinking and repetitive movements of the body). It emerges from the productive energies of labour itself. “This is indeed the key characteristic of immaterial labour: to produce communication, social relations, and cooperation.”
This reconstitution of the mass of labour means that concepts like the reserve army of labour, once deployed to explain the threat to the hegemony of industrial workers, is now redundant since this group no longer has a privileged position in class structure. Since what is produced by the multitude is biopower rather than material commodities then the old divisions between skill sets become blurred and all workers become, potentially, interchangeable. Under a regime of capitalist power this is translated into the idea of a flexible workforce and becomes the basis for precarity. Indeed, the most precarious groups – the poor – come to be “the representative or, better, the common expression of all creative activity.”
“To complete the inversion of the traditional image, then, we can say that the poor embody the ontological condition not only of resistance but also of productive life itself.” They draw on the example of migrants as being paradigmatic with regard to this point.
Ultra-flexibility imposes on workers the “requirement to change jobs, move geographically, travel empty-handed in conditions of poverty.” But they also need to be “full of knowledges, languages, skills, and creative capacities... “ . Migrants seek to ‘roll up-hill’ in terms of their search for better living conditions, freedom, and they do this by seeking to create a ‘common space’ and providing ‘testimony to the irreversible fact of globalisation.’ Immersion in this life of constant precarity, but still holding out the hope for betterment, requires this group of workers to place a positive value on their experiences and to make them the basis for an organising strategy.
This strategy is networking. It acquires additional salience from the fact that networks are the paradigmatic form of organisation for the production of immaterial value. Drawing on Foucault’s point about the way the ‘common forms’ of a period reappear in the elements of social reality and thought – eg the prison mimics the factory, the factory the school, and the school the barracks, etc an isomorphic principle is at work which reproduces the cooperative and communicative relationships dictated by the immaterial paradigm of production within the life strategies of the multitude.
What is it that the multitude is struggle against and how does it project its opposition? The authors argue that Marx’s labour theory of value has to be modified in the light of the demand for ultra-flexible labour which capital imposes on workers. Flexibility means that there is no longer a working day during which the worker produces both their own means of reproduction and surplus value for the boss. The working day is now incorporated into all forms of social life, including that which was previously considered private or leisure time. “The production of capital is, ever more clearly and directly, the production of social life.”
The idea of exploitation is no longer limited to what goes on during the working day, where the surplus value created by the worker is expropriated by the boss. Since production arises from the totality of social life then exploitation has to mean the expropriation of what is common to social life. “Exploitation is the private appropriation of part or all of the value that has been produced in common.”
Talk of the common leads to the question as to whether capital has now achieved a unified society analogous to the concept of body politics, where a hierarchical scheme is imposed with a ‘brain’ controlling the actions of the ‘limbs’ and other organs. The authors counter the idea of a hierarchically organised body with that of the multitude as a “singular flesh that refuses the organic unity of the body.” This unity can only arise from state coercion which refuses the identities of the multitude, or longed for in the nostalgic desire for old forms of ‘organic’ communities.
On the latter;
“Community practices that used to be part of the Left now become empty shadows of community that tend to lead to senseless violence, from rabid soccer fan clubs to charismatic religious cults and from revivals of Stalinist dogmatism to re-kindled antisemitism. The parties and trade unions of the Left, in search of the strong values of old, seem too often to fall back on old gestures like an automatic reflex. The old social bodies that used to sustain them are no longer there. The people is missing.”
The book then opens up into a discussion of democracy and its relevance to the struggles of the multitude. It can “…. no longer be evaluated in the liberal manner as a limit on equality or in the socialist way as a limit on freedom but rather must be the radicalisation without reserve of both freedom and equality.” Its half-developed existence in the shape of representation is also inadequate for the needs of the multitude. At this point there are a few words of approval for the idea of the early socialist movement which saw the “[d]emocracy would have to be constructed from below in a way that would neutralise the state’s monopoly of power. […] social movements recognised that the separation between political representation and economic administration was a key to the structures of oppression. They would have to find a way to make the instruments of political power coincide democratically with the economic management of society.”
And on the commonality of the struggles of the multitude:
“….as we argued at length in part 2, not only are the conditions of labour becoming increasingly common throughout the world, our production also tends to be biopolitical. We claimed, in other words, that the dominant forms of production tend to involve the production of knowledges, affect, communication, social relations – the production of the common social forms of life. The becoming common of labour, on the one hand, and the production of the common on the other, are not isolated to software engineers in Seattle and Hyderabad but also characterise health workers in Mexico and Mozambique, agriculturalists in Indonesia and Brazil, scientists in China and Russia, and industrial workers in Nigeria and Korea. And yet the new centrality of the common does not in any way diminish the singularity of the various situated subjectivities. The coincidence of the common and the singularities is what defines the concept of the multitude.”

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easier to read than empire, but for me there were parts of this book that were very concrete and other parts that I found to be a little naive and very vague. I read this with the genocide of Gaza as my backdrop. Throughout reading, I couldn’t help but think of Aaron Bushnell.

“When life itself is negated in the struggle to challenge sovereignty, the power over life and death that the sovereign exercises becomes useless. The absolute weapons against bodies are neutralized by the voluntary and absolute negation of the body… the exercise of this absolute sovereignty becomes contradictory with sovereignty itself”

His martyrdom has me made believe that the counterforce Hardt and Negri describe is possible

[Andreas Schmidt · Rating 1 out of 5]

Neologismi e nuove accezioni, a quale pro?
E' un testo dichiaratamente filosofico (lo dicono gli autori). Non ho mai amato particolarmente la filosofia. Il testo di per sé cerca di essere particolarmente complesso, cerca di vedere le cose da una prospettiva ampia (fin troppo), con il risultato, secondo me, che più si cerca l'astrazione, più la vera definizione della realtà sfugge all'occhio di chi cerca di descriverla. A leggere Moltitudine, mi sembra di vedere l'ossessione dei fisici di cercare la legge universale che include tutte le altre e completa la quadratura del cerchio. Bene, ciò detto, non mi soffermerei su tutti i temi del libro, che sono in realtà ben pochi: tre. Il primo è la guerra, all'interno del mondo-impero (non ho letto il precedente testo, ma mi sembra che sia un modo un po' più sdolcinato di considerare la "globalizzazione"). La lacuna principale di questo testo, è il considerare esclusivamente la storia umana dall'epoca moderna, ogni tanto ci si lancia in piccoli paragrafi "ah ma la roma imperiale, i mercenari...". A leggere gli autori, sembra che il terrorismo, i "partigiani", i terroristi, la lotta "partigiana" che rompe gli schemi della guerra di parata del 1800 e la guerra di massa, territoriale, tra stati, sia una un'invenzione del Ventesimo secolo. Ok, e la resistenza a Napoleone in Spagna? Per citarne una. Oppure la guerriglia che si trovarono ad affrontare nella penisola iberica e in Portogallo i romani quando invasero quella porzione di Europa? A me tutte queste considerazioni degli autori sembrano un tentativo nel 2004 di dare un senso all'11 settembre 2001, con il concetto di guerra continua (quando credo che la sua giustificazione, ossia la paura di un leader inafferrabile e celato, la cui mano continua a guidare il "terrore" a livello mondiale, sia cessato con la sua uccisione). La "biopolitica", mi par di capire comprenda un insieme non meglio definito di lavoro intellettuale che produce lavoro immateriale, un lavoro non più definito da orari e che produce materiale tangibile, che crea collegamenti e know-how tra le persone. In mezzo a considerazioni giuste (ad esempio il copyright sul lavoro intellettuale, che nella nuova era digitale, si svincola dalla scarsità di risorse perché infinitamente copiabile e distribuile, e che scardina per tanto le leggi economiche), trovo ancora tentativi di creare neologismi o nuove accezioni ai termini (che comunque trovo più gradevoli di boiate come "spread", "globalizzazione" etc). Moltitudine, concetto più o meno oscuro; si scorpora il concetto di "popolo" e si aggiungono definizioni per creare il concetto di Moltitudine. Non mi ha impressionato granché quest'ultima considerazione. Quanto detto finora, rimane un insieme di miei personalissimi appunti al testo, anche perché per l'appunto, non ho mai amato la ricerca filosofica di una teoria che racchiuda l'intero pensiero di un'epoca. E come ripeto, il testo soffre in particolare del fatto che gli autori si sono ostinati a voler considerare soltanto l'epoca moderna (>1789 d.C.), quando avrebbero dovuto considerare assai più gli ultimi duemila anni di storia. Just my 2 eurocents.

[DoctorM · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sequel to Negri & Hardt's "Empire", with a discussion of how "the Multitude"--- diffuse networks of local resistance ---can oppose the Empire of equally diffuse, stateless global capital. Negri & Hardt draw heavily on Foucault's idea of "biopower" as a description of the kind of control their vision of Empire exerts--- not so much political imperium as a kind of all-pervasive economic and cultural system. They look to autonomous local movements (e.g., the Zapatistas) throughout the world as little seedbeds of resistance--- though their vision never quite explains how culturally and politically diverse and contradictory movements can replace the power of Empire with a democratic world or offer anything other than saying No. Not a bad read, but I'd recommend skipping this and going straight to their "Empire and After", which is a more tightly-structured work.

[Peter De Cauwer · Rating 1 out of 5]

There are some really interesting ideas in this book, but in order to get to those nuggets you need to wade up to your neck into a sea of neo-marxist drivel. It all looks like the n-th attempt at saving Marx' ideology to me. I really thought that this kind of book died somewhere in the 70s and that I was about to read something new. What a disappointment!

[Natalia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't believe I'm saying this, but it seems these authors are even more idealistic than I am. This book describes recent phenonmena relating to globalization in an interesting way, but the arguments are not well-supported and the solutions read like fairy tales.

[Soha Bayoumi]

I liked the analysis of Empire more, but I still loved this one with all the revolutionary spirit and zeal it expresses

[Maram Tebini · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read that is heavy on theory and insights

[Nicole]

Going to be chewing on this one forever, probably.

[Constantia Munda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Main Points -

1 - Multitude must discover the common to act together.

2 - War/police thwarts all social transformations. Constant war is constant social war.

3 - US military victory justifies imperialism. The mass soldier, the unknown soldier.

4 - The political order is corrupt, but the military is not corrupt. America is now Vietnam and Nicaragua.

5 - Low intensity conflict.

6 - Revolt against exploitation – Idiocy was not the problem but bad communication in rural parts of the world.

7 - Immaterial production. Idolatry is not just the means, but also the ways. Expropriation.

8 - Global apartheid. No democracy. No free market.

9 - Refuedalization. Carnivalesque literature, Voltaire, Cervantes, Dostoyevsky’s multiple write/character dialogues creates reality. Polyphonic. Black Panther Style. EZLN style.

10 Aristocracy –oligarchy, monarchy, tyranny. The Bible rules – Jews, Christians and their control fraud debt rules.

11 - International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court: US doesn’t recognize.

12 - US controls the world. Guantanamo violates the Geneva Conventions and US Criminal Law.

13 - Law of Finance are the Laws of Abstraction. Expansionism and isolationism.

14 - Global Justice for “comfort women” or African slaves? Anticolonialism and anti-imperialist.

15 - Golden Calf worshipped by the Jew; destroyed by Moses.

16 - Authors think "Love" and Star Trek analogies are the answer?!

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Goddamn I finally finished this. That took me like 2 months, and I'm not sure it was worth it. Basically it's like ultra-ultra-dense with references and covers a ridiculously wide range of ideas, which is cool, but then the interesting insights are intermixed with a ton of like postmodern-y talk about biopolitical common singularities and subjectivities constituting multitudes and stuff. Here's a non-made-up quote I underlined from the very end: "The common is both natural and artificial; it is our first, second, third, and nth nature. There is no singularity, then, that is not itself established in the common ... On this biopolitical fabric, multitudes intersect with other multitudes, and from the thousand points of intersection, from the thousand rhizomes that link these multitudinous productions, from the thousand reflections born in every singularity emerge inevitably the life of the multitude." (pg 349)

So yeah 1 star off for not removing these nice-sounding but vacuous parts in between the actually interesting parts, and then 1 star off again because you kind of have to read "Empire" first I think, which I haven't read yet and which looks even longer than this one O___O

[Peter Harrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

This will need a longer review in due course. This book is the follow up to Hardt and Negri's Empire (which I reviewed here: https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2...). The authors follow on here by working through how the mechanisms of global governance, which they characterise as 'empire', use a permanent state of war to assert control. In a longer subsequent section they then explore the nature of the 'multitude' of ordinary people . Their approach continues to fit neatly into the shift from a modern world to a postmodern world, and is truly thought provoking on the nature of immaterial work ('biopolitical' as they term it) and the influence this has on bringing people together and what it means for create sites of resistance to Empire. To me a least thought, the final section talking about routes forward is much less convincing, overly optimistic about the nature of modern resistance movements and without a real sense of how the multitude they theorise might find a way forward. In short interesting, but flawed.

[Ta · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lot of insightful analysis.

Authors said right from the beginning that this is not a "how-to" book, but a philosophical essay on the state of the world and presumed right steps to fix it. Still, the steps are vague and the authors don't have all the answers. The solutions are in many ways dogmatic and there is a lot of recursive reasoning why the solutions are appropriate and will work out. The evidence is incredibly circumstantial.

Nonetheless, the description of the state of the world is brilliant, even if not the full truth. It provokes imagination and makes me think, see connections that were not there before. I will still need to think on it before my opinion on the book solidifies. It may already be the seal of approval it needs: after all, if there is so much to think about, it must have been valuable source of knowledge.

[MykÆ G · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good follow up to Empire. Lighter, more readable, less theory heavy - but I liked all of those things about Empire. While the book seems to promise more concrete resolutions than Empire, by the end Hard and Negri shy away from saying much of anything about Democracy or the Multitude as if they fear being wrong in their prognostications. Well, where nothing is wagered, nothing is earned.

I am sympathetic to their project and find myself enticed towards Negri's autonomism, however this book is not likely to win over the not yet converted.

Also - and I'm being completely serious here - love turns out to be the answer. Come on, I already know that.

[Zhenia Vasiliev · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging account of the multitude as the means for analysing the collectivity's involvement with socio-economic processes in their relation to freedom, rights, the modes of resistance to hegemonies and alternatives to sovereignty.

[Cybermilitia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yazarim bir ara. Kotu kotu cok kotu...

[Emre vs.]

Imparatorlugun devami ve argumanin baglandigi nitelilikte.

[wesley · Rating 1 out of 5]

wordy and pretty much unreadable. did not finish

[Wei Chang · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't even know where to start; this is the exact representation of why the left keeps failing. An illusion built upon other's illusion.

[Sarvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

the best declaring book about democracy. Negri and Hardt beautifully retrieve the desire of democracy from the diversity of the Multitude and yet in its integration. The Multitude integrates through the formation of common act.
I had goose bumps all over the book.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good read in itself, but especially useful for discussions of soverignty in the transatlantic, post-Fordian world. Hardt and Negri suggest that there can be government by all, a democracy of the multitude. I'm especially interested in their revision of representation in this world. Also, I like to think about what immaterial labor looks like, especially affective labor, and what might compensation for it look like.

The main claim of “Democracy of the Multitude” is that, contrary to Hobbes, and, indeed, contrary to most of Western political though, there doesn’t have to be a rule of “the one”—whether that one is a king or a united “the people”—and there can be a true “democracy of the multitude.” Times have changed and our view of power must change with them.

The catchphrase of the chapter is that that the multitude can be “exploited but not excluded.” Multitude can’t be excluded because sovereignty is “a dual system of power” (332); a sovereign without subjects isn’t a sovereign. In this way, “The sovereign is similarly constrained to negotiate a relationship with the ruled and solicit its consent” in a way similar to how capital needs labor and labor needs capital (333).

Since the rise of globalization, this is even more true. Since an Empire, with transnational political interests and multinational corporations, has unlimited population, no group is disposable: “a truly global society […] becomes ever more autonomous while Empire relies on it ever more heavily” (335). Now the false binary that Hobbes declares is exposed “We are thus no longer bound by the old blackmail; the choice is not between sovereignty or anarchy. The power of the multitude to create social relationships […] thus presents a new possibility for politics” (336).

What this project might look like takes the rest of the chapter. Hardt and Negri describe a society that is essentially crowdsourced civilization, “a society whose source code is revealed so that we all can work collaboratively to solve its bugs and create new, better social programs” (340). The way that the multitude creates society through economics becomes “not only a model for political decision-making, but also tends itself to become political decision-making” (339).

Hardt and Negri also talk about the role of power and weapons in this new society and this part is a little tricky. They set out 3 rules for violence: 1- it must be for political goals only, 2- it must be defensive, to defend society and not create it 3-there can be no separation between ends and means. While careful to condemn car bombers, they suggest the multitude’s biopower, as demonstrated in Lysistrata (347).

Ultimately, Hardt and Negri propose a combination of Lenin’s vision of “another world” built through bioproduction and a wider definition of love (351-2) and Madison’s structured republican utopianism, the ultimate goal of which is “a revolution, aware of the violence of biopower and the structural forms of authority to use the constitutional instruments of th republican tradition to destroy sovereignty and establish a democracy from below” (355).

[Benjamin]

In their sequel to Empire, Hardt and Negri trace the lineaments of a beast with multiple backs they call Multitude: different people coming together to oppose Capital/Empire who celebrate/enjoy/accept their differences, and yet still work together towards the creation of "the common". (In the tag to his review of Empire in The New Left Review, Gopal Balakrishnan notes that Empire is "a new Roman order, awaiting its early Christians"; Multitude, then, is those early Christians, awaiting their lions [cf. 346-7, on martyrdom as a by-product of political activism].) I'll sum up the work with a quote:

"People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept, but a concept of love is just what we need to grasp the constituent power of the multitude. The modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family. Love has become a strictly private affair. We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love. We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern traditions. Christianity and Judaism, for example, both conceive love as a political act that constructs the multitude. Love means precisely that our expansive encounters and continuous collaborations bring us joy. THere is really nothing necessarily metaphysical about the Christian and Judaic love of God: both God's love of humanity and humanity's love of God are expressed and incarnated in the common material political project of the multitude. We need to recover today this material and political sense of love, a love as strong as death. This does not mean you cannot love your spouse, your mother, and your child. It only means that your love does not end there, that loves serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction of a new society. Without this love, we are nothing." (351-2)

[Phillip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hardt and Negri are probably best known for Empire, but I think Multitude and Commonwealth are way more interesting and important books. For me, Empire diagnoses our contemporary political situation, but Multitude and Commonwealth imagine how to overcome the contemporary Imperial system of late capitalist bioproduction.

Multitude argues for the productive and creative strength of the multitude, which is a flexible network of singularities. Singularities are individuals formed within their contexts--so in contrast to the Enlightenment conception of human being as self-contained, the singularity is shaped by contexts, identity categories, communities, and individual reactions to those contexts. When singularities interact, communicate, work together, or encounter one another they do so through (and simultaneously produce) the common. The common is the fabric of the multitude. The common is/are the shared resources of collective life, including codes, languages, ideas, images, modes of subjectivity, etc. Anything that becomes a point of connection between two or more singularities exists in common, and the act of singularities working together within the common produces/increases/amplifies the common.

Hardt and Negri argue that the multitude is the only political formation capable of producing true democracy--that is, the rule of all by all. Because the multitude is interconnected and yet non-hierarchical it allows true democracy. How exactly this is to be achieved is unclear in Multitude, but Hardt and Negri assert that the task for creating genuine democracy is to imagine new globalized forms that reject the logic of sovereignty, a logic which always subordinates the many to a singular authority (whether that be a monarch, a dictator, a parliament, or The People).

[Adam Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Multitude is Hardt and Negri's follow-up to their first book *Empire*. That first book established the emergence of a global political imperial order. In this book they take on the development of the other half of globalization's effect: the production of the multitude - everyone who is not part of the money-and-power structure. This multitude is, they argue, unlike conceptions of "the people" or populist movements, because it is not a unity but a plurality of groups and movements operating in concert, and it is entirely hierarchical. The book is an attempt to use Marx and socialism and direct democracy by developing a post-Marx philosophical basis for the rule of all by all, global direct democracy. The book is dense and complicated in its philosophical arguments (partially because it is a translation), but rich and rewarding nonetheless.

[Andrew]

Juuuust the sort of well-written, post-Marxist activism this world needs right now. Having adored Hardt & Negri's previous collaboration, Empire, I thought I'd look at their supposedly less academic sequel. While I appreciated the effort, I really preferred the more academic version, in which they trace a lot of contemporary bullshittery back to Hegel, compare Fordist and Taylorist production schemes, and so on. I also have some qualms about their Pollyanna attitude vis-a-vis the multitude overcoming empire, but I very much appreciate their work and ideas.

[X · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wasn't awarded the opportunity to complete this book (exams) for my own leisure, but I thoroughly enjoyed the pages I read. This is a very timely book that more people should read. I can see how the academic style is off-putting, however. Multitude is not the most accessible book, since it's not intended for the laity but fellow political intellectuals and academes. Good read.

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard, exactly, to describe this book's influence - but perhaps a metaphor.

It's like someone showed me a map and asked me where my house is. So I said "right there" and pointed. They then showed me all the other ways my house was "right there" - longitude and latitude, topographical map, distance from other major cities, etc. Remarkable.