"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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Empire: the multitude
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July 5, 2004
After looking back over the international Marxist tradition of liberation Hardt and Negri ask:
"But how can this potential for liberation be realized today? Does that same uncontainable desire for freedom that broke and buried the nation-state and that determined the transition toward Empire still live beneath the ashes of the present, the ashes of the fire that consumed the internationalist proletarian subject that was centered on the industrial working class? What has come to stand in the place of that subject? In what sense can we say that the ontological rooting of a new multitude has come to be a positive or alternative actor in the articulation of globalization?"
These questions need to be asked because the new subject of revolt is not the international industrial working class. It is the multitude of anti-globalisation protesters, who are made up of politically diverse groups – anti-capitalists, protectionists, anarchists, environmentalists, alternative life-stylers, travellers, animal welfare activists, anti-fascists (fascists) and so on. They are generally clear about what they’re against – globalisation, capitalism, neo-liberalism-that make up the Washington consensus--than what they are for. And they understand that the corporate form of globalization stands for “There is no alternative to this”. It basically says that you cannot follow distinctive national policies, labour standards or welfare rights, because there are people in Jakarta or China who would have your job.
On the other hand, this anti-globalization multitude has a good grasp of our mutual interconnectedness and vulnerability. In the 21st century we no longer inhabit a world of discrete national communities. Instead, we live in a world where the trajectories of different countries are deeply enmeshed with each other. As David Held puts it:
"In our world, it is not only the violent exception that links people together across borders; the very nature of everyday living – of work and money and beliefs, as well as of trade, communications and finance, not to speak of the earth’s environment, connects us all in multiple ways with increasing intensity."
The multitude's critical concern with corporate globalization of the Washington consensus now needs to be overlaid with the Washington security agenda. We are caught up in, and shaped by, both. So we can usefully bring Hardt & Negri into play with this material.
Now Hardt & Negri recognize that the very subject of labor and revolt has changed profoundly. They say that the composition of the proletariat has transformed and thus our understanding of it must change too. So how do they do this?
Hardt & Negri say that in modernity the old:
"....industrial working class was often accorded the leading role over other figures of labor (such as peasant labor and reproductive labor) in both economic analyses and political movements. Today that working class has all but disappeared from view. It has not ceased to exist, but it has been displaced from its privileged position in the capitalist economy and its hegemonic position in the class composition of the proletariat. .... It means, rather, that we are faced once again with the analytical task of understanding the new composition of the proletariat as a class... Our point here is that all of these diverse forms of labor are in some way subject to capitalist discipline and capitalist relations of production. This fact of being within capital and sustaining capital is what defines the proletariat as a class."
They do so struggle and revolt that reveal trace of the multitude's refusal of exploitation and that signal a new kind of proletarian solidarity and militancy.They menton them:
"Consider the most radical and powerful struggles of the final years of the twentieth century: the Tiananmen Square events in 1989, the Intifada against Israeli state authority, the May 1992 revolt in Los Angeles, the uprising in Chiapas that began in 1994, and the series of strikes that paralyzed France in December 1995, and those that crippled South Korea in 1996. Each of these struggles was specific and based on immediate regional concerns in such a way that they could in no respect be linked together as a globally expanding chain of revolt."
They say that we ought to be able to recognize that although all of these struggles focused on their own local and immediate circumstances, they all nonetheless posed problems of supranational relevance, problems that are proper to the new figure of imperial capitalist regulation:
"We ought to be able to recognize that this is not the appearance of a new cycle of internationalist struggles, but rather the emergence of a new quality of social movements. We ought to be able to recognize, in other words, the fundamentally new characteristics these struggles all present, despite their radical diversity. First, each struggle, though firmly rooted in local conditions, leaps immediately to the global level and attacks the imperial constitution in its generality. Second, all the struggles destroy the traditional distinction between economic and political struggles. The struggles are at once economic, political, and cultural-and hence they are biopolitical struggles, struggles over the form of life. They are constituent struggles, creating new public spaces and new forms of community."
Okay. Let us grant them the argument. That these diverse struggles are struggles over forms of life. They are struggles to bring about the good life.
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Is the multitude that Hardt and Negri speak of the "multitude of anti-globalization protestors" or the "post-industrial working class"? Or are Hardt and Negri asserting that these two multitudes are in fact one and the same?
I am willing to grant them the point provisionally, but let's keep in mind that, so far, no evidence has been presented in support of it. It is simply being postulated.