| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 56

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin 2004)

THE PERIOD from the "Battle of Seattle" in November 1999 to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 was one of excitement and hope for most supporters of progressive social change. The global justice movement was mobilizing in advanced capitalist countries around meetings of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and similar symbols of neoliberalism, proclaiming that "Another World is Possible" and beginning promising interactions with unions and community organizations. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (2000) was the most celebrated theoretical work associated with the movement, although this dense text was neither a product of the movement nor read by many of its activists, at least in North America.

The years since 2001 have had a very different political character than the two that preceded them. This is especially true in the US and Canada, where massive but short-lived anti-war protests failed to stop the political retreat that followed 9/11. Multitude, the sequel to Empire, arrives at a time when serious interrogation of contemporary capitalism and prospects for change is much needed. What Hardt and Negri offer here is another tome that, as Alex Callinicos observed of Empire, is "as much a work of applied post-structuralist philosophy as it is a piece of concrete historical analysis." Like Empire, many of whose ideas it reprises, Multitude is a work of great ambition and scope that cites a wide range of scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. This short review is limited to the book's central theme.

Multitude opens with a discussion of a pressing issue that received little attention in Empire: war, which the authors identify as the main obstacle to democracy in the world today. The place of war has changed. War was once pushed to the margins of society as a state of exception, but in the emergent mode of global rule the authors dub Empire, "the state of exception has become permanent and general ... pervading both foreign relations and the homeland." (7) War is a form of biopower, producing and controlling social life. The enormous power of the US state, which received little attention in Empire, is acknowledged as a crucial feature of the age of permanent war. Discussing military doctrine, Hardt and Negri argue that US power must assume the form of a network to deal with the kind of asymmetrical insurgencies it faces in the age of Empire. Networks abound in Multitude, as the authors analyse the shifting forms of subaltern resistance from the Cuban and Chinese revolutions through to the early 21st century as a progressive evolution driven by the desire for more democracy, autonomy, and efficacy, culminating in the network form of the global justice movement.

The network form is spreading because this is the characteristic form of immaterial labour, which is dominant in the age of post-Fordism. Immaterial labour is absolutely central to Multitude. Immaterial labour is labour that creates immaterial products, including knowledge, emotional effects, and social relationships. Hardt and Negri are clear that most workers in the world today do not perform immaterial labour, but they argue that immaterial labour is hegemonic in a qualitative sense and is increasingly putting its stamp on other forms of labour and, more generally, on society. Immaterial labour, they acknowledge, is not necessarily pleasant work. However, it is brimming with positive qualities and radical potential. Immaterial labour produces cooperation, which is now external to capital rather than created by it. It is biopolitical, producing social life itself. It is dissolving the division between work and life. It is also increasingly shackled by private property and capitalist exploitation, understood as the parasitical "expropriation of the common." (150)

By creating a growing qualitative commonality among different concrete kinds of labour, immaterial labour is the basis for the singularities acting in common that are the multitude. The multitude is the name Hardt and Negri give to the emerging formation of peasants , wage-workers, the unwaged, the poor, migrants, and others that they believe is the collective subject capable of realizing a truly democratic and liberatory transformation of society. Modern revolutions have been making "a halting and uneven but nonetheless real progression toward the realization of the absolute concept of democracy." (241) The multitude is at last capable of achieving this democracy, as the many demands for reforms raised around the world today suggest.

Multitude engages with issues that are key to understanding the world today. It does so from a perspective that is resolutely opposed to all forms of exploitation and oppression, and rejects the stance, common even among critics of neoliberalism, that a progressive alternative to capitalism is impossible or not worth discussing. But the extent to which these virtues raise a reader's hopes and expectations is also the extent to which Multitude disappoints.

There are deep-rooted problems in the way Multitude theorizes contemporary society. The concept of immaterial labour, the lynchpin for the book's central argument, is unsound and cannot bear the explanatory and political burden placed on it. It proposes that labour is increasingly outside of and against capital (an idea whose origins lie in the kind of autonomist Marxism that Negri helped to create in the 1970s). This allows Hardt and Negri to wax eloquent about its positive qualities and make it the basis of the multitude. They also argue that the line between work and life is being dissolved, one consequence of which is that Marx's law of value no longer holds. Unfortunately, far from escaping from capital, labour in the world today is increasingly commodified and subsumed by capital.

The very examples given by the authors — Microsoft workers and low-wage workers forced to hold down multiple jobs (145) — suggest a very different and more plausible interpretation of trends in capitalism than Multitude's: work for capitalist employers is devouring a larger proportion of many people's lives. It is not Marx's theory of value (which the authors apparently misunderstand, since they wrongly suggest that Smith, Ricardo, and Marx held to the same law of value [145]) that is unsustainable but Hardt and Negri's notion of an immaterial labour whose cooperative and communicative dimensions exist outside of capital and whose products are "in many respects, immediately social and common." (114) This in an era of ever more extensive com-modification? The idea that immaterial labour makes possible the emergence, without the involvement of any organized political forces, of the multitude as a collective subject able to transform society is also extremely unconvincing.

Multitude has little or nothing to say about a number of crucial developments in the contemporary world. For example, what are we to make of the rise in a number of countries of Islamism as a reactionary political force with mass appeal? Its analysis of "socialist" (Stalinist) societies is remarkably shallow. More broadly, Multitude does not theorize on the basis of concrete analyses of working-class and other social movements. There is no serious examination of how movements have been affected by capitalist restructuring, of the crises of social democracy, Stalin-ism, and "Third World" nationalist politics, or of how movements have responded to these challenges. Reading Multitude brings to mind what E.P. Thompson had to say about kangaroo-like theorizing that "proceeds in gigantic bounds through the conceptual elements, with the most gracious curvatures of thought," touching the earth only briefly between leaps. Boldly theorizing on the basis of limited observations is a longstanding habit for Negri, who was criticized for this by some of his comrades in the late 1970s, as Steve Wright recounts in his study of Italian autonomist Marx-ism, Storming Heaven (2002).

It is also unclear what the "postsocialist" anti-capitalist politics advocated by the authors really amount to because their formulations about the real democracy of which the multitude is the bearer are so abstract and the book contains little in the way of clear strategic thinking. Hardt and Negri endorse Max Weber's critique of socialism, claiming that "contemporary forms of right-wing populism and fascism are deformed offsprings of socialism." (255) Surprisingly, they see potential in alliances in the South between "aristocracies" (local ruling classes) and the multitude — in other words, Popular Front-style cross-class alliances of the kind that have done so much harm to movements in Brazil, South Africa, and many other countries.

As a result of these problems, the book's hopeful vision lacks anything approaching a plausible grounding in an analysis of capitalism and social struggles in our time. Despite the authors' denial of a "preordained linear march toward absolute democracy," (93) Multitude suggests that the multitude is indeed on the march towards true democracy. Although it touches on issues that badly need serious study, such as changes in the organization of paid work within global capitalism, Multitude's dubious social theory and evasion of so many tough questions about class recomposition and politics make it a very limited contribution indeed.


David Camfield University of Manitoba

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