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March 12, 2006
I mentioned in the previous post that Hardt and Negri had argued that the form of globalisation they sketched in Empire requires us to think of new forms of democracy that can expand rule by the people to the transnational level.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2005) re-imagines the proletariat as a heterogeneous web of workers, migrants, social movements, and non-governmental organisations - "potentially ... all the diverse figures of social production", "the living alternative that grows within Empire."
The basic idea is as follows. The multitude is not " the people," but rather many peoples acting in networked concert. Because of its plurality, its "innumerable internal differences", the multitude contains the genus of true democracy. At the same time, the multitude's ability to communicate and collaborate - often through the very capitalist networks that oppress it - allows it to produce a common body of knowledge and ideas ("the common") that can serve as a platform for democratic resistance to Empire.
The second basic idea is the mode of political organisation embraced by the multitude. In place of "centralised forms of revolutionary dictatorship and command," the multitude organises resistance to globalisation through networks, which substitute "collaborative relationships" for hierarchical authority. Revolution from below is by a movement that can marry the spontaneity of anarchy with the power of mass resistance. Woodstock meets the Internet.
Is that not Seattle's 1999 moment for radical global civil society in the march against MacDonalds and the World Bank? The many seemingly different and independent struggles throughout the world are actually linked because as capital becomes more and more widespread, the struggles are objectively anti-capitalist.
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