This special issue of IJŽS is centred upon a lecture that Slavoj Žižek gave on 10 March 2009 at the Howard Assembly Room, in Leeds, United Kingdom. The title of the lecture was “Brunhilde’s Act, or, why was it so difficult for Wagner to find a proper ending for his Twilight of the Gods?” and its presentation was followed by a question and answer session chaired by Prof. Derek B. Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology at the University of Leeds. IJŽS is pleased to present a video transcript of the lecture.

Access the Video: http://zizekstudies.org/video/zizek_wagner.html

Paper: BRUNHILDE’S ACT by Slavoj  Žižek providing full context to the talk:  http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/294/362

Link

The article is an inquisitorial process to present the most widely read and translated French philosopher in the world as a sadistic guru of criminal politics and a lewd, thirsty vampire.

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Eric Conan’s article seeks to discredit the name of Alain Badiou and the thoughts he represents today (and beyond), particularly among young intellectuals. It masquerades in the guise of an investigation, when what it aims to do is criminalize the man.
Indeed, Eric Conan’s article is devoid of any understanding of Badiou’s philosophy, his politics and the substance of his work. In other words, the article is an absolute vacuity. It reveals the workings of a creepy strategy favoured by some journalism, one that is lost in the inessential: when the ‘ad hominem’ replaces the question of ‘Ideas’ and when unfounded personal allegations become the art of trash thoughts.

Eric Doran’s article is a model of our ‘non-thinking’ times. It is the quintessential, more or less unconscious, of the tamed and opiated ideology propagated by this type of journalism: one that understands a book without reading it, thus reducing it to a witch-hunt; one that sees Communism as the reverse of Nazism and treats those citizens who lay claim to it or indeed, who are won over by it, in whatever form, as basically sick individuals. In effect, the aberrant equation of our times is this: Communism = Nazism. Period.
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Against this, we assert the following:

1. That the work of Alain Badiou is that of a great philosopher. Those who wish to contest this statement must first go through the complexities of ‘ l’Etre et l’Evenement and ‘Logiques des mondes’. It will then remain to be seen whether this statement can still be denied, notwithstanding the resentment at having understood nothing of his work.

2. That the political positions of Alain Badiou, namely, on the one hand,  his criticism of ‘capital-parliamentarism’; the confusion between democracy’s empty form and its lifeblood; the circus  that is parliamentary representation; and on the other hand, his assertion for a ‘generic communism’, supported by the ‘Idea’ of equality, from Spartacus to our present day. These are indeed the only positions that now deserve the name of authentic politics.

The rest is well established and is given the blessing by both institutions  and humans. Those who dare criticize are immediately classed as werewolves and diabolical anti-democrats; this attitude sums up the contemporary version of a ‘skunk’ ideology: one that is only half-conscious of its own scent. In other words, when 9 million men and women worldwide are dying every year of hunger and disease, we prefer debating the ‘lucky hand’ or, for that matter, the ‘cheater hand’ of Henry the footballer. Or when we assign an asylum-seeker, an Arab or a black to a delinquency status; or when we make the world believe that its central problem lies in defeating Al Qaeda’s terror; or when we slide into a confusion that is so utterly stupid that we lump together 1.5 billion Muslims – who are so different from one another -in one category, that of a purely sectarian phenomenon. We make an exception for the burka – which, incidentally, is no more disgusting than the right to dye one’s hair red – and make it society’s major debate…

The rest, or the non-authentic politics, is when we endorse the ghost of democracy whose roots lie in our old institutions and their variable geometrical parameters, thus making obsolete the vote of the people on Europe by a hocus-pocus in the House of Deputies. It is when everyday citizens are presented with ludicrous categories: bad communists and good democrats, good America and bad Saddam … It is when we glamorize the French Revolution and demonize the Russian Revolution; It is when we divide to rule better as we watch incredulously the financial flows being virtually created and lost; It is when we are finally satisfied with the way the world is, and continues to be…It is when we are made to believe that the possible is impossible.

3) It is, therefore, difficult to pass Alain Badiou for a crazy loner. The reality is that we have had enough of these lies, of complaisance to this system, and that we will never renounce the ‘Idea of Communism’.  This ‘Idea’, as problematic as it is and so new its embodiment does not prevent us from being as critical as we want to be of the history of 20^th century’s communism. We are and can be as different from one another in our proposals but we all know and agree on one thing: that a communism to reinvent, of a new and undefined kind, is the only future for humanity. This is because we think this is the one and only eternal political truth and the only justice that the rational mind can ever conceive.
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The times no longer belong, whether one likes it or not, to the spineless, self-styled and unscrupulous ‘new philosophers’ – but to the philosophers of renewal.

Slavoj Zizek, Fabien Tarby

English Translation : Nada Cabani

Eric Conan’s article in French is reproduced here (link)

The Night Shift is a guide for those of you who are lost: for the thinkers amongst you who are frustrated by a lack of progress in creating a just society and for the practical amongst you who are at a loss as to what you should actually be doing. The nature of our questions eliminates the possibility of any pre-defined destination, but we hope that you can find the direction you lack. This, then, is the heart of The Night Shift: movement with guidance, force with direction, ideas with action.

Time to stop and think about schools "choice"

I have previously written about debates on education in India (link) and the push by the economic liberals (some of who also side with social right wing, who side with economic liberals) for “schools choice” as a means to solving India’s poor record in primary education. The economic liberals like to make the case for choice and believe that the state should be out of delivery, which should be the left to the market, and instead provide cash transfers or school vouchers, which can be redeemed by the economically lower classes in any private school. Thus, they try to prove that they are better (morally and managerially) at addressing the issue of education, a key component of development.

The “choice” debate often invokes the example of social democratic states that have “reformed” and have embraced the “choice” logic. Choice is often proposed in various forms: school vouchers, parents setting up and managing schools, which is in turn funded by the state. This is often used as an argument to further delegitimise any role for the state in education and instead open up social and cultural spaces to be governed by markets. Sweden has often been cited as an example of choice over public education (for e.g., see Heartland Institute, a libertarian organisation; report by BBC).

A report by The Guardian, UK (link) based on an investigation by BBC’s Newsnight (here) throws a spanner in the works. Per Thulberg, director general of the Swedish National Agency for Education argued in the Newsnight report that overall education standards had fallen at the same time since the introduction of the new schools. “We can’t say the introduction of new schools had led to better results,” stated Thulberg. He also stated that children that did well in these schools was to do with their backgrounds. “They came from well educated families,” he stated.

In the developing world, votaries of economic liberalism are pushing for “reforms” in education based on hunch and an argument that on the face of it looks very persuasive. But scratch beneath the surface and you find that it is the elites who benefit from reforms in education. As the Newsnight’s Liz MacKean reported, the Conservatives (in the UK) are now struggling to defend their enthusiasm for this program, which they announced as a key educational reform they would introduce if they came to power. The Conservatives, now state in private that the enthusiasm was “based on a hunch”.

6.1 Revolutionary Parallelism

This chapter rethinks identity politics from the perspective of revolution. Hardt and Negri unfold their argument by first critiquing what might be called “liberal” or “liberal multiculturalist” variants of identity politics which have culminated in “race-blind discourses” and struggles for social recognition. The problem with these movements is that “race-blindness” tends to obfuscate continued structures of subordination and hierarchy, on one hand, while recognition fails to challenge the transcendent basis of identity, on the other. With this being said, Hardt and Negri argue that identity must form the foundation of a revolutionary politics, however, such a politics cannot end with identity. In other words, paradoxically, revolutionary politics must begin with identity but culminate in its abolition. Hardt and Negri outline three tasks for such a revolutionary politics. First, it is urgent to make visible the ongoing salience of race, class, and gender subordination within the social and institutional structures of our supposedly post-political era. This step recognizes identity as having concrete social effects that must be exposed to critical scrutiny and demystification. Second, struggles against social hierarchy must be channeled toward the drive for freedom, defined not by the preservation of identity as an essentialized form of property, but by the principles of self-determination, mutability, and transformation. According to Hardt and Negri

The terminological distinction between emancipation and liberation is crucial here: whereas emancipation strives for the freedom of identity, liberation aims at the freedom of self-determination and self-transformation, the freedom to be who you can become. Politics fixed on identity immobilizes the production of subjectivity; liberation instead requires engaging and taking control of the production of subjectivity, keeping it moving forward. (332)

The third task is to keep identity moving forward along a path toward its own abolition. I see this less as a destruction of identity than a process of transformation beyond the narrow essentialist parameters and categories imposed on identity both internally and externally. In reality, Hardt and Negri argue that the three tasks must be performed simultaneously in multiple zones through polyvalent strategies and movements unleashing the potential for boundless differentiation and collective organization on the basis of irreducible singularities. In other words, the three tasks of a revolutionary identity politics—(1) sociopolitical demystification (2) struggles for liberation (3) and abolition—do not arrive at a destination marked by the bland and apolitical elision of social difference, but rather open up the possibility for the articulation of a world teaming with multiplicity and becoming. According to Hardt and Negri, the realization of this revolutionary ontology requires fidelity to parallel projects of class, gender, race, and sexual liberation working both autonomously and in coordination.

6.2 Insurrectional Intersections

After having outlined the contours of a revolutionary parallelism in 6.1, Hardt and Negri again revisit the question of how such a horizontally organized, intersectional, and immanent political figure can collaborate and act as a political subject. This is a question that Hardt and Negri simply do not and perhaps, by design, cannot answer in any kind of satisfying way. They are forced to largely just repeat their fundamental philosophical positions regarding biopolitical production and subjectivity. They argue that in today’s biopolitical economy where social life based on the common has become the primary field of social struggle, revolutionary movements rooted on a vanguard party, or the construction of a new hegemonic collective identity, simply cannot form the foundation for a path toward an ethical project of democratic becoming. Moreover, they claim that the circuits of biopolitical labor and production actually enable the technical and social apparatuses through which the inauguration of this new revolutionary ontology might be realized on the basis of the common. While I can largely accept the ontological idealism of Hardt and Negri’s political project as a genuinely innovative and hopeful vision of democratic possibility, this does not mean I am convinced that they have adequately provided a basis for understanding the processes through which this revolutionary becoming can internally differentiate between beneficial and detrimental forms of the common in both their fruition and perpetuation. However, I am also not convinced that this in any way lessons the ethico-political value of Hardt and Negri’s project. To use a music analogy, the Empire series is a bit like the high fusion of Miles Davis. It is essentially rooted in a recombination of ideas already in circulation in a way that fundamentally transforms those ideas while assembling something that is anticipatory and forward looking. The re-alignment, in other words, forms something new, something untimely, in the sense that it touches on, hints at, still nascent aesthetic and technological possibilities. In the case of Miles Davis, this meant anticipating the invention of hip-hop, I think for Hardt and Negri this means anticipating a potential for democratic life that still largely defies the conceptual vocabularies and postures of attunement closest to us.

This is visible in the slightly less than satisfying attempts of Hardt and Negri to fully articulate the processes by which the multitude might pragmatically function: (a) take power, and, (b) govern itself. However, Hardt and Negri are attempting to push the conversation forward. In the latter part of this chapter, for instance, they attempt to articulate the parameters of an institutional form capable of preserving the revolutionary consistency of the multitude while enabling it to govern itself basis of the common. They distinguish between two lines of social political thought on institutional structures: (1) a major line rooted in consensus driven social contract theory (2) a minor line of social conflict theory that privileges the role of antagonism in the processes of democratic renewal. Taking the minor line, this section has Hardt and Negri slipping into something quite close to the radical democratic theory of Chantel Mouffe (although H&N would probably abject to this characterization), where institutions are imagined as sites where singularities can enter into productive conflict in order to constantly challenge, reformulate, and re-define democracy as a perpetually unfinished project: “something to come” in Derrida’s words.

6.3 Governing the Revolution

After imagining a new institutional form, they turn in this last chapter to how the multitude can take power and govern itself in a way that preserves its constituent orientation. First, they advocate for a revolutionary event that definitively breaks with the cycles of production and reproduction of Empire. Drawing from, but expanding on Gramsci, they argue that the transition from the insurrectional event to the government of the multitude requires thinking economic, cultural, and political struggle on the biopolitical field that brings together a variety of strategies and points of struggle. They state:

We are not faced with an alternative—either insurrection or institutional struggle, either passive or active revolution. Instead revolution must be simultaneously insurrection and institution, structural and superstructural transformation. This is the path of the ‘becoming-Prince’ of the multitude. (367)

They wrap up the chapter by trying to imagine juridical-legal authority on the basis of the multitude. Here they argue that Empire already inaugurates a series of technological, social, and legal systems that can be made to serve revolutionary purposes. Once made to serve the multitude, Hardt and Negri argue that the revolution has a will to achieve a constitutional form. They state:

A constituent governance that inverts the imperial form would have to present not simply a normative figure of rule, and not only a functional structure of social consensus and cooperation, but also and open and socially generalized schema for social experimentation and democratic innovation. This would be a constitutional system in which the “sources of law” and their means for legitimation are based solely on constituent power and democratic decision making. Just as insurrectional has to become institutional, so too must revolution, in this way, become constitutional, building through struggle after struggle, on successive levels that indefatigably overflow every systemic equilibrium, toward a democracy of the common. (375)

Part 5: Beyond Capital?

5.1 Terms of the Economic Transition

Neoliberal Zombies

The joining of neoliberalism and unilateralism in the latter half of the twentieth century is illustrative of the problems faced by capital in contending with the emergence of biopolitical production. In fact, the current crisis in neoliberalism is not due to unilateralism’s death grip, but rather because both systems proved to be solutions generated by an outmoded approach to understanding production. Hardt and Negri argue that greater/lesser deregulatory political-economic paradigms associated with either the US or in the European Union were in fact in competition to become the political support mechanism for neoliberalism. The problem for capital, according to David Harvey, is that neoliberalism is not about the production of wealth (capital’s fundamental necessity); it is instead predicated on the redistribution of wealth, largely based on the expropriation of socialised wealth, i.e. the transfer of wealth from formerly public institutions to for-profit, private institutions. In this way, neoliberalism and unilateralism were incapable of responding to the challenges set forth in the changing terrain of production: how to contend with the production of images, affects, etc? For example, the production of knowledge, which was once an instrument for the capitalist as a means toward the production of value, and was thus internal to capital (part of its command and control), is now a value itself that has begun to be produced outside of capital. This presents a problem: the more capital rests on value creation through knowledge production as such, the more knowledge escapes its control.

Socialist Illusions

Here Hardt and Negri argue that just as neoliberalism is unfit to face the challenges brought about by biopolitical production, so are outmoded illusions of socialism. For Hardt and Negri, socialism and capitalism appear as two sides of the same coin. Both are ways to manage and control the production of wealth and the use of resources. Indeed, socialism itself is concerned, as is neoliberalism, with redistributing wealth, not creating it. In both cases, as they have argued throughout the book, biopolitical production’s need for autonomy to create and exploit networks of affinity and cooperation is all too often fettered by control from above, whether that is in the form of a capitalist factory floor or in the form of state regulation and disciplining of the workday. Indeed, among the numerous factors that influence the decline of the Soviet Union, they locate the incapacity of socialism for dealing with biopolitical production as crucial: social and cultural creativity existed in the waning days of the USSR, but were stagnated by oppressive state control. Biopolitical production’s “products” are incommensurable with the productivist logic of capitalism or socialism – their immateriality is difficult if not impossible to measure. Capital and government regulation both attempt to control productivity and neutralize the immaterial and both hinder the productive capacity of biopolitical production. Hardt and Negri outline three major (and failed) approaches for contending with biopolitical production. First, the concept of “social capital” acknowledges the importance of networks, affinities, and the immaterial social fabric as crucial to production, but sees these factors as supplementary to the productive process itself: they are not products themselves. Thus, social capital is always made to conform to a productivist logic, made measurable. Second, classic notions of a social democracy in which the interests of capital and those of labour are mediated by institutions such as trade unions similarly attempt to incorporate what they can into their logic, making any labour outside of this logic incompatible. But, labour unions can no longer reasonable represent the multiple categories of types of work and workers for the reasons developed in earlier chapters and the social democratic perspective becomes exclusionary. Finally, the “third way,” famously associated with Anthony Giddens and Tony Blair, though it acknowledges the importance of the immaterial, attempts to hitch biopolitical production to the neoliberal wagon. But the efforts to privatize what, according to Hardt and Negri, is fundamentally oriented toward the common prove the incompatibility of biopolitics and neoliberalism. For Hardt and Negri renewed calls for socialism miss the point and are doomed to fail just as neoliberalism has. They propose reinforcing the difference between socialism and communism: what the private is to capitalism, the public is to socialism, the common is to communism.

The Global Aristocracy and Imperial Governance

The main question raised in this section is, despite what appear to be the failures of neoliberalism, socialism, multilateralism, and unilateralism, and with the failure of transnational organisations like the IMF, World Bank, etc. to sufficiently resolve crises: How is that things still keep working? To address this vexing question, Hardt and Negri first note that the system of global governance is currently ad-hoc and chaotic. They suggest that imperial governance is “aristocratic,” and cite Joseph Nye, who suggests that American imperialism, hegemony, and empire, are in no way accurate descriptors of the global political economic situation. From Nye’s work, Hardt and Negri construct an imperial pyramid, with the US at the top as the “monarch,” sole military superpower; corporations, subordinate states, and invested players as the middle “aristocracy,” and; NGOs, clergy, media systems who claim to represent “the people” at the bottom. Despite its pyramidical shape, this is not a case of absolute monarchic control by the US. Nor is the aristocracy necessarily homogenous. The various skirmishes and disagreements between the members of this middle level, and their antagonism toward the monarch; amount to jockeying for position and attempts to get a piece of the global capitalist action. In relation to the bottom level, the aristocracy is supported by those who claim to be “for the people” but who are often interested in getting their piece too. The NGOs, clergy, and mass media all at one time or another purport to represent the interest of the multitude, despite their being actually no “people” that can be represented. The reason this system continues is because of the fear of the resistance of the multitude by the aristocracy and the monarchy. This resistance is where Hardt and Negri locate the potential for revolution, the place where alternatives to imperial rule are to be found.

5.2 What Remains of Capitalism

The Biopolitical Cycle of the Common

In this section, Hardt and Negri are concerned to situate the common as different from traditional public vs. private debates. Here, they invert the notion of economic “externalities,” commonly associated with those elements of production that cannot be adequately measured and accounted for, and often seen by capital as missed market opportunities. Instead, they argue, the biopolitical production “internalises” the common, making it the prime measure and resulting in a view of private property as a “missing commons” and “common failures.” The rise of debates over intellectual property has thrust concerns over the common into the contemporary imagination. The common resists its privatisation and control through copyrights and patents just as it resists public institutional efforts to control and administer access. Thus, biopolitical inverts capital’s association of freedom with private property; rather than seeing public control as antithetical to freedom, the common becomes the locus of freedom, standing against private control. The importance of social growth is key to conceiving the political economy of the common; this social growth is the capacity to create and involves an “increasing stock of the common accessible in society.” (283) Hardt and Negri cite that the common’s lack of constraint by a logic of scarcity is also crucial here; the production of the common does not necessitate a loss when it is “used”—affects, images, ideas, are not used up when shared and in fact, increase the capacities of those involved in their exchange. The cycles that characterise traditional economistic analyses (boom and bust narratives) are also in need of significant alteration under conditions of biopolitical production. Their argument that there are two types of generation of the common—positive and negative—hold the key to understanding the qualitative dimension of biopolitical cycles. Economic indicators would have to be based around questions about the common’s accessibility, the autonomy of its productive networks, the ratio of positive to negative influences on the common, etc.

The Tableau économique of the Common

This section presents a reworking of 18th-century French economist Francois Quesnay’s Tableau économique, in which the relations of monetary exchanges are traced out broadly over the economy. Marx was influenced by Quesnay, who saw agriculture as the only truly productive force in an economy since other fields merely repurposed already existing value. Marx placed labour (not land) at the centre of the capitalist economic paradigm, noting that surplus value was created through the exploitation of labour and the constant expansion into new markets to distribute the products of this labour. Hardt and Negri offer a narrative that sees agricultural centrality overlapping with and adapting to the procession toward industry, and industry as overlapping with and adapting to the procession toward biopolitical production. So, just as agriculture adopted wage labour and mechanisation, so must industry adapt to the communicative and affective networks of biopolitical production. In adapting the Tableau to biopolitical production there are several difficulties that threaten the stability of the table: 1. Capital depends on biopolitical labour, but biopolitical labour becomes increasingly less dependent on Capital; 2. how do you measure qualities? Hardt and Negri also note that Marx’s conception of necessary and surplus labour, though useful, need to be reformulated. Firstly, necessary labour in this case is that which produces the common (which is in turn the source of social relations). The wage was the common site of struggle for necessary labour, but under biopolitical production the struggle must be over the common and the creation of social relations. Secondly, surplus labour and value has to be reconceived: what is exploited now is the result of social power; capital exploits the products of the common. Here, Hardt and Negri point out, is a potentially explosive situation: “the social productive forces, which are antagonistic and autonomous, inside and outside the market, are necessary for capitalist accumulation but threaten its command.” (288) The traditional responses to crisis in capitalism have been war, which as discussed previously has been exhausted as an effective solution, and finance, which Hardt and Negri argue has been the only effective way for capital to exploit the autonomy of biopolitical labour because it remains outside the productive process as such. The new Tableau économique thus results in a tripartite table of struggles. 1. The Struggle of the Common Against Work, in which the productivity of biopolitical labour needs to be defended from attempts at control and command; 2. The Struggle of the Common Against the Wage: the wage is not the only thing that reproduces biopolitical labour, the common does too. Thus, this is a defence against that which threatens the creation and maintenance of social life; 3. The Struggle of the Common Against Capital is the defence of democratic organisation of the productive forces of the common.

One Divides Into Two

This section addresses the difficulties of reintegrating biopolitical production into capital. Taking their cue from an old Maoist slogan, “The one divides into two,” Hardt and Negri tease out various emerging dualities and problems with traditional workers vs. capital dialectics. Drawing on Mario Tronti, they note that the traditional dialectic of labour vs. capital results in a continued process of worker revolt that hastens capitalist restructuring, which is in turn followed by more revolt and more restructuring. For Hardt and Negri this is never enough, it never takes flight from capital and labour and production remain internal. In the context of biopolitical production however, labour becomes increasingly external to capital, no longer a variable capital. The precarity and change in work temporalities discussed earlier signal the emergence of two conflicting subjectivities: biopolitical labour is increasingly autonomous (as is necessary for it to function) and multitudinous while capital struggles to extract wealth and relies on this production despite its increasing autonomy. The only semi-effective strategy for Capital has been financial control, which “extends and amplifies” the dual nature of money as both a universal equivalent and medium of exchange and as the representation of value. One anti-capitalist strategy for confronting money has been to take it out of the equation and move toward systems of barter (this strategy appears utopian in its desire to return to a lost innocent time, pre-money). Another strategy, through fair trade and equal exchange has been to preserve money’s representational value but take away its power over the social field of production. Hardt and Negri ask whether a third strategy that maintains both functions of money is possible. Here they suggest that if the category of abstract labour can be paralleled with that of abstract finance, as a means to come to grips with the multitude as subject.

5.3 Pre-shocks Along the Fault Lines

Capital’s Prognosis

Working from the assumptions that capital will not rule forever and that it will create the conditions for the modes of production that will succeed it, Hardt and Negri propose themselves as doctors, diagnosing the symptoms of capital’s illness. They cite Schumpeter’s valuing of entrepreneurialism as capital’s driving force and note that he criticised post-war American capitalism for degenerating onto a management rationality that vitiates any innovative spirit.  They note that some may argue that computer industry mavens like Jobs or Gates may be classified as modern day Schumpeterian innovators but, Hardt and Negri deftly point out, much of their so-called innovations are actually the exploitations of the labours and innovations of a multitude of technology experts that are far beyond the borders of capital. (In this case, people working in Open Source Software and free software movements are often ahead of the curve of mainstream technology companies). A second symptom is capital’s inability to engage the productive forces of biopolitical production. As they have discussed throughout, the institutions and machinations of capital (as with the state) are a fetter to the full potential of biopolitical production—there are “disposable” workers, and positions that require a minimum of creativity and do not fully engage with people’s capacities to create and innovate. Hardt and Negri advocate viewing capital’s crises in subjective terms, moving away from overly rationalised objective explanations for boom and bust. In this way, they note that the products of biopolitical production still need to circulate to realise their value, but that this circulation is actually a part of the productive process itself—the production of the common. The production of the common is the production of subjectivity, and the production of subjectivity is the production of the common. Thus, the “crisis of the biopolitical circuit should be understood…as a blockage in the production of subjectivity or an obstacle to the productivity of the common.” (300)

Exodus from the Republic

Although they admit that they are a long way from being able to propose new structures and methods for achieving an exodus from the republic of property, Hardt and Negri outline here a few key obstacles to and necessities for such an exodus.  As they have discussed throughout the book, both the capitalist and state strategies for providing the organisation of productive cooperation are now no longer necessary, and are in fact a blockage to realising the true potentials of the common. Freedom is thus key to the creation of the common, and it is a freedom that is neither individualist (as no individual alone can create the common) nor is it collectivist (as there is no possibility for a homogenous mass within the singularities that make up the multitude). Instead, this is a freedom from hierarchies, a freedom from the legitimation of authority that is inscribed in the traditional understanding of the “contract” (whether individual or social).  Biopolitical production is often configured as a conversation, with no boundaries or hierarchies preventing those with varying knowledges and capacities from participating. But, as Hardt and Negri have noted in their discussion about the metropolis, let us not hastily think of all “conversations” as benign. In fact, part of the goal is to withdraw also from the toxic and infelicitous versions of the common that are created in negative encounters. In order to create the common there must also be a move away from representation and toward a more radical democracy. Representation, whether seen as the creation of a “people” constructed through the relationship with a leader, or as the constitutional representation designed to at once involve and separate people from the political process, is an aristocratic form of governance, and thus reinscribes or creates new hierarchies that fetter the production of the common. Thus, this new democracies seizes on the notion of multitudinous entrepreneurialism as a means toward the power of decision making.

Seismic Retrofit: A Reformist Program for Capital

In this section Hardt and Negri enumerate the potential remedies for the illness that is affecting capital, though they do so with the full belief that their tonic will not be accepted by the patient. Instead, this section amounts to a list of impossible demands of capital and a programme for the further development of the common. First, they note that adequate physical infrastructure needs to be developed that will supply the multitude with water, sanitation, electricity, access to food, etc. The basic infrastructure provides a foundation from which the other necessary elements of biopolitical production can flourish. A social and intellectual infrastructure is also necessary, and bolsters and is bolstered by an open information and culture infrastructure. This means that the multitude must educate and be educated, and must have access to the tools and materials needed to build this knowledge. Restrictive regimes of copyright and hierarchical access to education will not suffice. Funding must also be made available to promote advanced research in the absence of profits hitherto gained from restricting access to knowledge. Additionally, there are two fundamental individual freedoms necessary for the development of the common (or to cure the ills of capital if anyone would listen, which they doubt). First, subjects must be free to move, to immigrate and to associate, but they must also be free to choose to stay put. This means that border restrictions and arbitrary favouritism among nations must be put to rest and that no one should be compelled to move in order to find work. Second, everyone would be free from the infringement upon their time. For this to work there would first have to be a guaranteed income for all, regardless of work, that would provide for the necessities of life. More control over time and movement in space would allow the multitude to pursue the power of decision making, and to learn democracy, as Jefferson argued, by doing it.

Part 4: Empire Returns

4.1 Brief History of a  Failed Coup D’État

Let the Dead Bury the Dead

For Hardt and Negri, the definitive event of the 21st century, thus far, has been the failure of unilateralism. They see the failure of the US to gain imperial supremacy as evidence that imperialism itself is a dead ideology,  and that scholarly acceptance of the US as imperialism, based on out-moded theories,  hastens the necessity that “the dead bury the dead.” Drawing from their work in Empire, they suggest that toward the end of the 1990s “Empire” was a new global order that was qualitatively different that previous forms of imperial power that had their basis in the dominant political unit of the nation-state. Instead, the problem for the 21st century is one of a wide networked distribution of varied powers contributed to by many actors. I t was characterised by the collaboration of states, corporations, global economic and political institutions, etc. For international relations scholars then, the traditional narrative of world history that moved from a multipolar world, through a US/USSR dominated bipolarity, to an “end of history” unipolar world dominated by the US were no longer adequate for understanding the emergence of a new global order. Hardt and Negri argue that reactionary forces, typified by American neoconservatives, pursued an agenda of unilateral imperialist glory that rejected the emergent formation of Empire, in essence “a coup d’état within the global system.” (205)  The defining moment for this coup was the catastrophe of September 11th. They argue, however, that the imperial attempt failed largely due the neoconservatives’ rejection of Empire. The neoconservatives were in favour of American exceptionalism, seeing the US as having a responsibility to unilaterally impose political power around the world, spreading democracy, and thus guarantee peace. But, Hardt and Negri point out, a reliance on, but inability to adapt military strategy, coupled with a tenuous relationship to economic concerns, hastened the failure of the project. Finally, taking for granted that other nation-states would simply play along, these new imperialists disregarded the need for moral or political authority. In the end, this imperialist project attempted to “assert hegemony without concern for, and even scorning the necessary prerequisites for, that hegemony itself.” (208) Imperialist projects, they argue, did not fail because of poor execution, as many neoconservative hard liners would suggest, but rather because “unilateralism and imperialist projects were already dead.” The furore over the imperialist actions of the US gave rise to a series of criticisms from the Left that, according to Hardt and Negri, declared there was in fact no new world order, and that imperialism remained as it was defined in the 19th and 20th centuries. These writers accepted the exceptionalism of the US as a force of domination, and this acceptance mimics the outmoded ideologies of imperialism itself.

The Exhaustion of US Hegemony

In this section Hardt and Negri examine the details of the military, political, and moral breakdown that were part of the failure of US unilateralism. Economic breakdowns appear in the following section, while this section is dominated by military discussion. They propose that the war in Iraq demonstrates the soundness of “two well-established truths of military thought.” (210) First, the nature of size and composition of a force is crucial. In Iraq the US experimented with reduced troop numbers and preferred a mobile, technologically-enhanced formation. Both of these factors make for a successful offensive strategy, but do not function well as a defensive strategy for an occupying force–occupations require large numbers. Second, different subjectivities emerge from the conflict between occupied and occupier. In this case, occupied forces take on a subjectivity of resistance, a “willingness to risk harm and death,” (211) while occupying forces, especially now when justifications for foreign wars can barely rely on notions of patriotism, lack access to subjective production. Occupying armies are populated by mercenaries, who presumably lack any kind of ideological attachment to a “cause.” These obstacles are only enhanced by the problems associated with urban warfare. Hearkening back to their discussion of the metropolis as a site of production of the common (pp. 153-56), Hardt and Negri note here that insurrections that emerge in urban centres rely on the established spaces, communication circuits, and social networks. Remarkably, the same mobile, technologically advanced force that is failing in Iraq and Afghanistan is still the paradigm that military thinkers are relying upon to hold sway over the larger-in-number but less well equipped armies of emergent nations such as China.  The political and moral breakdown of US unilateralism go hand in hand: the ideological explanation for US hegemony, so it goes, held the notion that the US was always acting in the interest of peace and democracy, both domestically and internationally. The reality, Hardt and Negri argue, is different: other nations accepted US hegemony only when US interests also advanced their interests. The last vestiges of a virtuous US were erased by Abu Ghraib and the legitimisation of the practice of torture, and when it became clear that the US was pursuing a unilateral agenda. The “ideological cover” that aided and abetted US hegemony had already been hollowed out because the pursuit of war, its economic policies, etc., no longer advanced the interests of formerly willing accomplice states.

What is a Dollar Worth?

Here, Hardt and Negri offer the key aspects of the breakdown of US economic supremacy, what they see as a series of “no confidence votes”: the “neoliberal experiment” of Iraq and its failure; economic relations to other nations; currency; global finance’s interdependency, and; the recognition of wasteful spending of the War on Terror. Iraqi oilfields were important to the US, they argue, but the real point was to see if it was possible to create a functioning neoliberal state from the ground up. Thus, in Iraq, existing economic, social relations, labour structures, etc. were destroyed and then rebuilt according to neoliberal logic. The newly privatised nation ran into trouble when foreign corporations were afraid to invest due to violent instability that made it difficult to conduct business, and when they doubted the legitimacy of their operations under the eyes of international law. The experiment’s failure was further exacerbated by the resistance of Iraqi workers to privatisation. Whether or not US unilateralism was good for business then became a key question, not so much for individual corporations, but for the international community. In fact it was not, and thus the US lost the ability to impose its economic will on other nations. Especially in Latin America, US interests ceased to align with the interests of other countries. US currency too, they assert, has lost its power as the global standard. And though it may remain the symbolic standard for years to come, its real power has been lost due to the interdependence of global finance markets. The US housing crisis revealed the US’s dependence on global finance, while the corresponding global meltdown was illustrative of global finance’s dependence on US markets. Finally, Hardt and Negri see the aftermath of hurricane Katrina as a point in which all of the failures of US unilateralism come into play: the labelling of the citizens affected as “refugees” brought home conditions associated with the subordinated world and revealed continuing racial divisions. Some commentators even pointed out the “war on terror” contributed to the devastation because a) the National Guard were busy, and couldn’t be called on for help, and b) the funds used to support the foreign wars could have been used in domestic infrastructure improvements.

4.2 After US Hegemony

Interregnum

Here Hardt and Negri problematise the “search for successor candidates to global hegemony” in the wake of the failure of US unilateralism, arguing that the possibility of a hegemonic nation-state or sovereign power is now impossible. We now live in transitional times between imperialism and Empire. Giovanni Arrighi notes that the rising trajectory of a hegemonic power usually features an increase in investment in productive processes, while its decline is marked by a shift toward finance. The financialisation of the US economy (beginning the decoupling of the dollar from the gold standard), is further coupled with US military failures (Vietnam is seen here as the “signal crisis” and the occupation of Iraq as the “terminal” crisis in US decline), and Arrighi suggests that a new cycle of accumulation will emerge, albeit one that is not centred around a single nation-state, but rather a combination of formerly subordinate regions. Hardt and Negri point out the difficulty in imagining the novel form that the new global order will take  by noting the tendency to think in terms of a new (or really renewed) multilateralism based on a version of 19th century multilateralism with ideology, rather than religion, as its central guiding force. They argue, however, that the systems that would support such a multilateralism no longer exist; such a system and its institutions (such as the United Nations), already weakened, did not survive the final blow of failed US unilateralism.

Imperial Governance

Drawing on Saskia Sassen’s analysis of emergence political and economic formations, Hardt and Negri argue that after unilateralism fails and a return to multilateralism is impossible, a shift in perspective is needed to recognize new forms of management, regulation, and control.   Sassen argues that the emerging global order is forming both within and outside of nation-states, it is an assemblage of national, supra-national, and non-national institutions and authorities. In no way is there a power vacuum, post uni- or multi-lateralism, instead there are multiple poles of power, and the construction of assemblages of state and non-state actors that are establishing new forms of authority. It is within various conceptions of “governance” that Hardt and Negri locate an opening toward a new perspective that focuses on collaboration and regulations without the existence of a hegemonic power. They trace two histories of the notion of governance: in corporate discourse the term refers to structures of authority and is useful in this context for providing a means to conceive of a non-state-oriented system of organisation; in the work of Niklas Luhmann and Michel Foucault, attention is paid to the “bottom up” processes of creativity of various political actors and the regulatory structures that surround them. Different models of governance derive from these two perspectives. 1)  notions of “market values” suggest a poly-centric organisation driven by structures of authority that favour commerce and profits; 2) a post-sovereign form of global governance in which states are the primary actors, though often working in an ad-hoc fashion; 3) one that draws on labour union institutions for the management of collective interests that cannot be dealt with at the individual level. This is a self-regulatory model whose actors consent to “polyarchic jurisdiction.” For Hardt and Negri, this third model is the most relevant for understanding governance within Empire. It is oligarchic, in which many international, national, corporations, etc. collaborate. It is a plural and flexible process. Each model is pluralistic and guilds from below. States continue to be major players in terms of policy making, though the production of law “takes command away from sovereignty, makes it adequate to the market, and distributes it among a variety of actors. (227) But, Hardt and Negri warn, this type of governance should not be mistaken for democracy.  Its multiplicity, they argue “is highly restricted to only a privileged set, an oligarchy of powers hierarchically related to one another, and its openness is severely limited by the effects of power and property.” (277)

The New Scramble for Africa

In this section, Hardt and Negri trouble the existence of a “flat” global economy that creates a more stable and equal playing field. Great divisions, they argue, still exist and are even deepened by globalisation, what may have formerly been “outsides” to capitalist production have been subsumed and exploited. They focus on the return of imperial-era approaches for extracting capital from subordinate regions, with particular focus on Africa and approach this phenomenon from Marx’s concept of formal vs. real subsumption of labour. Formal subsumption, for Marx, occurs when capital appropriates modes of labour and production that exist outside of a capitalist logic (e.g., craft production, certain agricultural practices). Real subsumption occurs when new forms of labour and production within the logic of capital (and here I can think of phenomena like “customer support” call centres, or even factory floor managers). This view has been expanded to see the whole of colonial activity as a passage from formal to real subsumption. From this view, formal subsumption marks a borderline between capital and non-capital, and holds the possibility of an outside, while real subsumption could be misconstrued as creating a flat and equal world. But, Hardt and Negri assert, as labour practices become globally divided there is a reciprocal passage from real to formal subsumption, a passage that does not re-create an “outside” to capital, but rather creates deeper divisions and boundaries. Whereas in the 19th century imperial activities in Africa concentrated on the extraction of natural resources (which does still continue today), there is now a focus on further extraction of wealth through dispossessing others’ existing wealth (presumably here they are suggesting that elements of the common in some subordinate nations are being appropriated by foreign business – much like the Bolivian water and gas situations and the neoliberal “experiment” in Iraq). This type of dispossession is aggravated by capital’s predatory stance in the face of natural and manmade catastrophes. While this type of dispossession is occurring elsewhere, Hardt and Negri highlight Africa for the particularly brutal forms it has taken: in diamond mines, in oil fields, etc.

4.3 Genealogy of Rebellion

Revolt Breathes Life Into History

The focus of this section is “spontaneous” revolt and the possibilities for harnessing and making a lasting transformation from resistance. Hardt and Negri begin with the notion of “indignation,” which, according to Spinoza, rests at the heart of movements of revolt. Indignation is the place where the power to act against oppression begins. It includes a dimension of violence and force which can appear spontaneous and naïve. Hardt and Negri call on the term “jacqueries,” traditionally associated with particularly bloody peasant revolts, to characterise contemporary violent revolt: from peasant revolts, through worker rebellions, to the Paris riots of 2005. The jacquerie, in traditional narratives, is always seen as a negative: though the people are legitimately suffering, their actions are too sporadic and too violent and thus are unable to leave a legitimate institutional wake; they disappear as quickly as they appeared. Yet, Hardt and Negri note, these revolts are often more organised than they seem, especially in the focus of their violence: peasants revolted against rent, workers revolted against the fixed capital of the factory owner, and the Paris revolts of 2005 focussed on conditions of social mobility and division such as transpiration and schools. Reactions against the jacqueries also tend to overemphasise the possibility for jacqueries to legitimate existing structures of power; in doing so these reactions miss the legitimacy that does exist in the creative and nomadic power of the jacqueries. The real task, Hardt and Negri argue, is how to transform the actions of the jacqueries into lasting change within the context of biopolitical production, where resistances can no longer be congealed and represented by one representative group (resistances can no longer be covered under an umbrella concern with wages and social services, for example). Jacqueries, though they are an essential part of transformative politics do not go far enough.

Anthropology of Resistance

Within the biopolitical context Hardt and Negri note the necessity of a new theory of revolution that builds on the potentials of the multitude and resists mystification. This section is concerned with examining the temporal dimensions of the biopolitical transformation of labour. Anthropological conditions in contemporary society are, they argue, are under the rule of biopower, and thus any possible resistance will also be be biopolitical. Drawing on Foucault, they note that the indignation that underpins revolt is at once a rupture and a continuance. That is, revolt is constant; it is “how the multitude makes history.” (241) Revolt here is seen as at once “within and against” that which it resists: the modern proletariat produces within a biopolitical world, but it also is against that same totality. Rather than a specific power to rebel against, contemporary revolt is directed against capital as a whole and for Hardt and Negri represents an exodus, a separation from the dominance of capital. Contemporary resistance is also marked by a change in temporality: work time and life time are increasingly simultaneous, with capital reaching beyond the traditional definitions of (socially) necessary labour and non-work time. Drawing on their thoughts on the poor from Chapter 1, they suggest that capital is always rooted in the present, while proletarian revolt was always oriented toward the future. However, as these temporalities collapse, revolution now cannot be imagined as a deferred event, but rather must exceed the present. They point to the struggles of 1968 as the definitive moment in which these temporalities began to coincide, where the socialist workers movement drew to a close and its dialectic relationship with labour institutions was destroyed. Finally, they revisit their previous separation of “the crowd” from “the multitude” as a means of recuperating the possibility of the crowd’s indignation to be organised, to be recomposed with all the subordinated classes and oriented toward revolution.

Geographies of Rebellion

This section is concerned with the spatial dimensions of the biopolitical transformation of labour. Drawing on their previous examination of the metropolis, they argue that the production of capital extends now beyond the factory into the entire social territory. In response to the deterritorialisation and nomadism of labour power resulting from imposed flexibility and necessary migration, and the corresponding breakdown of borders, capital is tasked with creating new borders and hierarchies in an effort to command and exploit. This is a “historical innovation” that reflects the inversion of the movement from formal to real subsumption of labour discussed earlier: it is not a return to old hierarchies and divisions between properly capitalist and non-capitalist forms of labour. The precarity that characterises biopolitical production results in both the social exclusion of workers while they paradoxically remain very much within the structures and processes of social and economic production: for example, workers often traverse metropolises in the course of their work day, and traverse continents in order to find employment. The emblematic figure of this precarity is the banlieusards, those who live in the poor peripheries of European metropolises. This precarity, along with the constant breaking down of borders negates the possibility of a political vanguard to lead the masses. The problem, for Hardt and Negri, is how best to reflect this decentralisation and dispersal politically, how to move from the revolt of a jacquerie to organisation. Jacqueries reformulate social space, reappropriating spatial and temporal dimensions of the multitude, but they do not define a positive organisational program. But, since, as with the banlieusards, they exist “within and against,” so do they provide the impetus for imagining solutions that also arise from within, but are oriented against. Nation states, NGOs, and trans-national institutions have all proven unable to organise global social space. Transformation, Hardt and Negri argue, can only emerge from the global movements of populations and their active refusal of norms of power. The multitude must create new institutions that will harness the positive potentials of the jacqueries’ revolts and the border defying actions of the banlieusards.

3.1 Metamorphoses of the Composition of Capital

This chapter proceeds to outline the biopolitical character of contemporary political economy and how contradictions rooted within this particular phase of global capitalism provide specific openings to social struggles centered on the common. First, Hardt and Negri detail the “technical composition of labor” within the biopolitical economy particularly the intersections of immaterial production, the feminization/flexibilization of labor, and new transnational flows and ethno-national mixtures of laboring bodies. This finds Hardt and Negri largely rehashing points already spelled out in Empire and Multitude. They claim that as labor is increasingly organized around the prevalence of immaterial production—the generation and circulation of knowledge, ideas, codes, languages, and affects—surplus value tends to emanate from the production of social life itself. “This means, of course, not that the production of material goods, such as automobiles and steel, is disappearing or even declining in quantity but rather that their value is increasingly dependent on and subordinated to immaterial factors and goods” (132). In other words, the object of production increasingly tends toward the production of a subject; that is, the social relations and forms of subjectivity conducive to generating value in the biopolitical economy. Hardt and Negri argue that “the traditional economic division between productive and reproductive labor breaks down in this context, as capitalist production is aimed ever more clearly at the production of not only (and perhaps not even primarily) commodities but also social relationships and forms of life” (133).

The key point here, Hardt and Negri argue, is that as biopolitical production becomes primary, it increasingly exceeds the material quantitative basis for the extraction of surplus value, engendering new frameworks of capitalist command and control alongside new possibilities for social contestation. This can be seen in the transformation of marketing strategies, for instance, where what is increasingly being sold is not commodities per se but experiences, such as through the spatial aesthetic design of Starbucks Coffee chains meant to capture the idea of urban living and community. Hardt and Negri argue that cognitive and affective labor is increasingly autonomous from capitalist command. As such, capitalism is required to generate surplus value externally to the production process through the expropriation of the common: “the becoming rent of profit”. This expropriation occurs in some cases through what David Harvey has referred to as “accumulation by dispossession”: the privatization of fixed assets like schools, transportation systems, health systems, natural resources etc. However, Hardt and Negri argue that it is more generalized than this, as value is wrenched from the common through the production and reproduction of social life itself.  Hardt and Negri locate this as an emerging crisis for capitalist accumulation. As capital attempts to exert control, it increasingly becomes a fetter to biopolitical labor, draining the common—the primary driver of wealth production—through its effort to privatize and expropriate its resources.

3.2 Class Struggle from Crisis to Exodus

Hardt and Negri proceed to argue that the increasing autonomy of biopolitical labor presents an opening for exodus: a new model of class struggle based upon the subtraction of labor from the production process on the basis of the common. Before turning to how such an exodus becomes possible through the realization of the multitude as political organization, they first track down existing forms of the common. First, they illustrate through urban real estate values and speculative finance, how specters of the common exist at the core of contemporary capitalist processes. In real estate, for example, value is generated primarily through proximity and access to common resources like good schools, transportation, and cultural institutions as opposed to the intrinsic value of property. Second, through a discussion of the family, the corporation, and the nation, they point out the ambivalent and paradoxical ways that these particular instantiations of the common can serve as both tools of capitalist command while providing foundations for the liberation of the multitude. They argue that

the family, the corporation, and the nation do engage and mobilize the common, even if in corrupted form, and thereby provide important resources for the exodus of the multitude. All these institutions present networks of productive cooperation, resources of wealth that are openly accessible, and circuits of communication that simultaneously whet the desire for the common and frustrate it. The multitude must flee the family, the corporation, and the nation but at the same time build on the promises of the common they mobilize. Keep in mind that opening and expanding access to the common in the context of biopolitical production means seizing control of the means of production and reproduction; that it is the basis for a process of subtraction from capital and the construction of autonomy of the multitude; and that this project of exodus is the primary form class struggle takes today. (164)

3.3 Kairos of the Multitude

Picking up where they leave off, Hardt and Negri state:

All the objective conditions are in place: biopolitical labor constantly exceeds the limits of capitalist command; there is a breach in the social relation of capital opening the possibility for biopolitical labor to claim its autonomy; the foundations of its exodus are given in the existence and constant creation of the common; and capital’s mechanisms of exploitation and control increasingly contradict and fetter biopolitical productivity. But there are also countervailing objective conditions: new capitalist mechanisms find novel ways to expropriate and privatize the common, and the old institutions ceaselessly corrupt it. Where does all this leave us? Analysis of objective conditions take us this far but no further. Capitalist crisis does not proceed automatically to collapse. The multiplicity of singularities that produce and are produced in the biopolitical field of the common do not spontaneously accomplish exodus and construct their autonomy. Political organization is needed to cross the threshold and generate political events. The kairos—the opportune moment that ruptures the monotony and repetitiveness of chronological time—has to be grasped by a political subject” (165).

This marks a turning point in Commonwealth from the analysis of “objective” conditions to Hardt and Negri’s attempt to formulate the multitude as a viable political subject capable of self-determination, organization, and action. Here they turn to various critiques of their project for inspiration. These criticisms might be broken down into two categories. First, there are those like Pierre Macherey and Ernesto Laclau who argue that the multitude, insofar as it remains a horizontally organized multiplicity of irreducible singularities, lacks the coherence necessary to act as a viable (unified) subject capable of political decision and action. Second, they engage a series of criticisms aimed not at the form of the multitude but its content. For example, Paulo Virno and Etienne Balibar point out that the multitude lacks the internal criteria to prevent it from acting in ways conducive to social exploitation and oppression. Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou take this point even further. For Zizek, the decentered and immanent organization of the multitude directly mirrors, and thus runs the risk of reproducing, the derritorialized relations of neoliberal domination it ostensibly claims to overcome. He denies the possibility that radical transformation can come from within the coordinates of capitalist social organization. Similarly, Badiou centers his critique on Hardt and Negri’s Foucauldian interpretation of resistance. Badiou argues that since resistance is constantly engaged with power, resistance never actually escapes power and thus becomes power’s unwitting accomplice. Thus a break, or a subtraction, from power is necessary, which in Badiou’s view requires fidelity to the ruptural event by bringing discipline and order to the multitude in its wake.

In order to respond to these criticisms, Hardt and Negri attempt to “shift the ground” of discussion from questions concerning being the multitude to the notion of making the multitude. This “making” refers to the idea that the multitude is a perpetual becoming, articulated on the plane of immanence, through the interplay between nature, cultural production, and subjectivity. In the biopolitical economy, as life itself is generated through the common, the circuits of communication and subject formation constitute an architecture through which collective activity is being organized. Hardt and Negri argue that these processes provide the conditions in which the multitude can act as a political subject without the necessity of establishing a hegemonic or sovereign authority through which to articulate and enact its self-governing capacities. This hinges on the ontological recognition/acceptance of the multitude as a network becoming rooted in the common. What enables this rhizomatic structure to act politically is a collective process of fleeing the detrimental and corrupted forms of the common and nurturing and developing the liberatory and democratic forms. How is the multitude able to collectively distinguish and nurture the liberatory forms of the common as opposed to the detrimental? This is a question they take up in the next section of the text through their mobilization of love as a political concept. It strikes me that Hardt and Negri’s response to their critics is necessarily insufficient. They are trying to formulate a model of social organization and revolution that is genuinely forward looking and experimental by design. One has to verify Hardt and Negri’s ontology in order to accept the possibility of a self-governing networked political actor. This amorphous anti-hierarchical political becoming is what inflects both the project’s dynamism and its limitations. The criticisms expressed by Laclau and Balibar thus present valid points of contention, while I think Badiou and Zizek’s criticisms are more easily dismissed.

Part 2: Modernity (and the Landscapes of Altermodernity)

2.1 Antimodernity as Resistance

Power and Resistance Within Modernity

In this section Hardt and Negri problematise the traditional dialectic opposition of modernity/antimodernity. This opposition, they argue, is what gives rise to problematic notions of modernity as an “unfinished project,” inherently good, and simply in need of further advance. They counter the traditional view of modernity as a process of a benign, universalised enlightened European sensibility that civilises an oppositional savage external world, by proposing that modernity itself is dualistic, characterised by the immanent coupling of domination and resistance. The forces of antimodernity, they argue, cannot be seen as being outside modernity but rather internal to it. This means that modernity, for Hardt and Negri, should be seen first and foremost as a power relation. In order to facilitate this ontological shift they first draw on contemporary characterisations of coloniality as a series of “encounters.” Encounters, as opposed to conquests, acknowledge the mutual mixtures and transformations experienced by the coloniser and colonised. Examples given include the adaptation by colonialists to pre-existing spatial layouts of Aztec city states and the influence of Iroquois Federalism on the political history of the United States. The language of encounter misses the violence of coloniality and thus Hardt and Negri continue with a psychoanalytic metaphor: European modernity is “psychotic” because it forecloses the possibility of alternative existences and the influence of the subjugated on the dominant. This is evident in attempts to erase alternate or antimodern histories, which are seen as a threat from the outside, as opposed to being constitutive of modernity itself. Finally, though centre/periphery models come closest to Hardt and Negri’s proposed duality, they run the risk of homogenising both the coloniser and colonised. “The West” is seen as the only “pole of domination,” without internal struggles and resistances, while “the rest” is seen as uniformly subordinate, without it’s own axes of domination. When modernity is understood as a power relation then seeing modernity as an unfinished project is much less benign than is suggested by Habermas and other theorists of social democracy. “More modernity,” Hardt and Negri argue, “is not an answer to our problems.” (71)

Slave Property in the Modern Republic

For Hardt and Negri modernity and republicanism are intimately linked because the republican form of property relations became the dominant form within modernity. Slave property is thus scandalous for the republic because it fundamentally contradicts notions of equality and freedom espoused by the French, American, and English revolutions, yet it forms the cornerstone of emerging republican economies. They ask: if slavery is so antithetical to these foundational notions of republicanism then why did it last so long, “not as a peripheral remnant of the past but as a central sustaining pedestal?” An ideological operation takes place in which republican discourses locate slavery as both an ancient phenomenon and a foil that operates against the capitalist conception of free labour. For Hardt and Negri then, this is “the point of maximum ideological contradiction with the republic of property…either freedom or property can be preserved, but not both.” (72) In posing slavery as a remnant of the premodern, modernity/capital can then propose that it offers modern solutions to this problem. Yet the issue of slavery is also a material one. Though Eurocentric histories see modernity as vanquishing slavery, in reality slavery was crucial to modernity’s development and a “massive segregation schema” (73) was enacted; freedom existed on one side of the Atlantic and was economically supported by slavery on the other. Racism then can be seen as one of the material supports for modernity. Attempts to foreclose or disavow the racist history of modern republicanism help to explain why the Haitian revolution has been systematically cast outside of historical accounts of “the Age of Revolution,” which are focussed on the “big three” republican revolutions. The Haitian revolution “reveals the profound contradiction between the ideology and substance of republicanism and modernity” (75) because, firstly, it freed slaves (thus violating modernity’s rule of property) and, secondly, it ended racial segregation (thus threatening modernity’s racial hierarchies).

Highlighting the relationship between slavery and modernity also helps us understand the power of slave resistance. Slaves are traditionally viewed abstractly as completely dominated subjects, though as Foucault noted, power and domination can only be enacted over subjects that resist. All subjects then, “have access to a margin of freedom, no matter how narrow that may be, which grounds their capacity to  resist.” (75) If slaves were in fact completely dominated then no power would be (nor need be) exercised over them. Thus, instead of conceiving of slavery as a vestige of the premodern to be vanquished by progressive forces of republicanism or capital, slaves themselves made their domination untenable as an economic system through their own capacity to resist. Citing DuBois, slaves set in motion an exodus, a “general strike” of sorts, that sabotaged the flow of  provisions to the Confederate Army during the Civil War. DuBois’s condensation of decades of slave revolt is meant to demonstrate the centrality of slaves in creating their own emancipation.  The point here is to see the resistances of antimodernity as existing within modernity itself. Contra Agamben then, Hardt and Negri assert that “humans cannot be reduced to ‘bare life’,” they remain “full of rage and power and hope.” (77) Thus, for Hardt &Negri, slave resistance is not antimodern because it rejects values of freedom and equality, but because it challenges the hierarchies that are central to modernity’s power relations.

The Coloniality of Biopower

In this section Hardt and Negri acknowledge and critique the function of ideology within the modernity-coloniality-racism complex. Forces of antimodernity are held in check both externally, through violence, control, and surveillance, and also through “internal mechanisms of subjectification.” (77) Heathens were converted to Christianity both by force and by re-education, within which the nature and capacities of natives were also redefined to meet the ideological motivations of the colonisers. Questions about native capacity for reason and their humanity are raised and “answered” in order to reinforce the hierarchy.  Here, capacity of native populations to be civilised is always seen as their capacity to receive such a salvation from the outside: the subjugated must first be ready to be saved. The limitation to critiquing the role of ideology, Hardt and Negri suggest, is that such critiques rest on ideology being somehow outside or separable from the subjugated and their interests. “Race thinking” is thus always posed as a failure of modernity and separate from modern society as a whole. Hardt and Negri propose a rethinking of racism not only in terms of ideological manifestations, but also in its material form. The powers of modernity-coloniality-racism are form of biopower that invests the subordinated with a productive power. Modernity’s power relations have never been just superstructural, but have material apparatuses that invest subjects. In this vein, “the Spanish Inquisition is an ideological structure, but it is also a highly developed bureaucracy” (80) To answer the question of whether or not, within biopower’s immense reach, there is possibility for resistance thus requires a reversal of perspective. Power is not primary and resistance a reaction to it, but rather, in line with Foucault’t assertion that power can only be exerted over “free subjects,” resistance is prior to power, it is “simply the effort to further, expand, and strengthen that freedom.” (81) Thus, the external standpoint that ideology critique seeks appears as “futile and disempowering.” (81)

2.2 Ambivalences of Modernity

Marxism and Modernity

This section begins with a critique of the notion of modernity as progress in various Marxist discourses that reinforce a teleological understanding of the move from pre-capitalist to capitalist modes of production similar to the social democratic notion of modernity as an unfinished project. This perspective sees the forces of antimodernity as backward and threatening. World-systems theories, they argue, have also inherited the Marxist ambivalence toward antimodernity and similarly reproduce its hierarchies. World markets are constituted through the gradual expansion of capital, though not absolutely linearly: there are cyclical contradictions and shifts in the dominance of particular geographic centres which in turn define new hierarchies and zones of exclusion. However, these systems take as given the “systemic nature of capitalist development.” (85) Antimodernity cannot be accounted for in these theories: because of their inability to recognise the role of class struggles in historical, social, and economic development; they cannot understand capital as a relation, nor can they account for the “resistances of subjects other than those directly involved in capitalist production.” (85) Yet there are other streams of Marxist thought that are better able to articulate the forces of antimodernity, though they remain, in Hardt and Negri’s estimation, still mixed with notions of modernity and progress. Lenin’s assessment that the battle between imperial powers in the First World War also created the conditions for breaking through ideological barriers that divided the world’s proletariat indicates a common struggle that breaks with progressivist discourses. Moreover, Mao’s elevation of the role of the peasantry in the struggle for liberation from capital represents an “antimodern theory of modernization.” (87) In later Marx he comes to see bourgeois private property as only one form that exists in parallel with many others. By focussing a model for communism in the Russian peasant communes, Marx’s thought moves away from notions of progress as there is no longer a requirement for the passage through capitalism on the road to communism. The importance of the common is only intimated here, but for Hardt and Negri is fully realised in the work of José Carlos Mariátegui. Mariátegui finds in Andean indigenous communities a solid basis in the common that can also serve as the basis for resistance within modern society. For Hardt and Negri, the combination of the above examples of Marxist revolutionary thought with “Inca communism” signals that antimodernity “should be understood first in the social expression of the common.” (89)

Socialist Development

The three great socialist revolutions—Russia, China, and Cuba—are each tied most intimately to notions of modernity and progress. They each reinforce notions of developmentalist political economies shared with the capitalist states that overshadow alternate political economic forms. Lenin’s attempts to reconcile his appreciation of antimodern antagonism with developmentalist economic strategies appear always as a deferral: the real problem here is that the “maturation process” of socialism never really ends. For Hardt and Negri this is an insufficient analysis of “the mystifying function of capitalist ideology and its notion of progress.” (91) As with other socialist states, the elements of antimodernity are eliminated while the hierarchies of modernity remain intact. Thus, the crises that enveloped Russian and Chinese socialism revealed the fundamental position of developmentalist ideology, both in Russia’s oversimplification of Marxism as a straightforward evolutionary move from the primitive, through capital, to the communist and in China’s refinement of a centralized political organisation of capitalist modes of production. Cuba has only managed to avert major damage by “freezing itself in time, becoming a kind of preserve of socialist ideology that has lost its original components.”[1] Similar developmentalist ideologies have been expressed throughout the “developing world” becoming a means by which forces of antimodernity could be repressed under notions of national development and, as class struggles were merely suppressed, resulted in a confusion of Left and Right political categories and a drive to the political centre. In fact, capitalism has managed to triumph, giving the brief socialist histories of Russia and China the distinct look of having been merely fuel for the development of capitalism. For example, socialism taught capital useful techniques, such as Keynesianism, which Hardt and Negri note is adopted by capitalist states in times of cyclical crisis. Yet, the three great socialist experiments did inspire anticapitalist and anti-imperialist movements, though such liberation struggles “can no longer be cast in terms of modernization and stages of development.” (94) Here Hardt and Negri recast Che Guevara’s turn away from his duties in post-revolutionary Cuba not as an abandonment of responsibility, but rather as a fidelity to core revolutionary principles of antimodernity that had been straitjacketed by the administration of a socialist state governed by a developmentalist ideology. Here there is a rejection of scientific socialism in favour of the power of movements from below to facilitate transformation.

Caliban Breaks Free of the Dialectic

Hardt and Negri invoke the concept of the monster in discourses of modernity as a means through which the forces of antimodernity were cast as non-enlightened, threatening, and savage, thus legitimising domination over them. Adorno and Horkheimer’s attempts to dialectically grasp the monsters of antimodernity, in which the immanence of antimodernity within modernity is acknowledged, are unable to find a way out of the barbarism that constantly frustrates the enlightened capacities of modernity. However, they are right to point out those non-liberatory aspects of antimodernity. But, in setting up modernity and antimodernity as a dialectic, they homogenize the forces of antimodernity as uniformly barbaric and threatening (the Nazis, or even popular culture) without recognizing that some types of antimodernity are liberating; this ultimately fixes antimodernities in solely oppositional roles. For Hardt and Negri, the monsters of antimodernity are not homogenous; far from bringing the dialectic to a standstill, certain antimodernities must be seen to be productive, exceeding domination and pointing toward alternatives. Breaking from Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic requires a reversal in perspective. This is achieved through reference to Caliban, the savage from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Reimaginings of Caliban’s role have focussed on his capacity for resistance, both through learning language from the Europeans and the possibility for him to free himself from his internalised subjugation. Finally, they offer the power of Spinoza’s imagination to exceed existing knowledge and thought and to facilitate transformation. Hardt and Negri suggest then that there are two positive tasks for analysing the forces of antimodernity:

1)      To distinguish between liberatory and reactionary versions of antimodernity.

2)      To acknowledge that resistance and freedom “exceed the relationship of domination” and cannot be “recuperated in any dialectic with modern power” (100)

2.3 Altermodernity

How Not to Get Stuck in Antimodernity

For Hardt and Negri, antimodernity is a useful starting place for theorising the common because it is firstly a resistance internal to modernity. Moreover, it is a “struggle for freedom within the power relation of modernity”; it is not geographically separated from modernity, each have always coexisted globally, and; it is prior to modernity. Since modernity’s power can only be enacted over already free subjects, there is no progression from antimodern to modern. However, there are limits to the concept of antimodernity because there is always the risk that it simply remains an oppositional stance. Hardt and Negri assert that it is necessary to move from resistance to alternatives, and thus propose the terminological shift from antimodernity to altermodernity. This shift is inspired by globalisation protests, which are interested in creating alternative versions of globalisation, in a sense taking the liberating elements of globalisation and jettisoning the disempowering ones. Altermodernity “marks conflict with modernity’s hierarchies as much does antimodernity but orients the forces of resistance more clearly toward an autonomous terrain.” (102) They propose that Frantz Fanon’s conception of  the evolution of “the colonised intellectual” provides a model for the shift, it passes through three stages: assimilation of European thought to become “more modern than the moderns”; a rebellion against Eurocentrism and a look back to one’s roots, an affirmation of identity that risks the creation of static position; a final creation of a new humanity, a revolutionary transformation. Discourses of indigeneity as a defense to colonialism are most interesting from this perspective. In former colonies (Canada, Australia, etc.) native resistance often begins with a rejection of stereotypes internalised from the colonisers, risking the static “authentic “position. Also, contemporary multiculturalism in former colonies requires that natives perform an “authentic identity,” deviation from which creates problems for the dominant culture. To move toward an altermodern conception requires acknowledgement of mixture, movement, and transformation in order to constantly renew native identities. This is seen most clearly in the Zapatista campaigns, which refuse fixed indigenous identity while also involving conflict with the Mexican state. Autonomy and self-determination are key features of this movement, which asserts the right to “become what we want” rather than simply “to be who we are.” (106) This ruptures the dialectic of modernity/antimodernity and creates the space for the constitution of alternatives. It also provides a model for distinguishing between a socialist and communist project. Socialism “straddles” modernity and antimodernity ambivalently, while, for Hardt and Negri, Communism ought to break with both and present an alternative path.

The Multitude in Coachamba

Here, Hardt and Negri develop a theory of parallelism. Altermodernity is equally concerned with culture and civilisation and labour and production. From the perspective of culture, labour movements are bound up with the developmentalist ideologies, while from the perspective of labour, culture and civilisation projects are primitive and antimodern. This conflict has threatened progressive movements throughout history, including peasant movements and gender struggles; among each, alliances were formed with either side. In altermodernity though, the various perspectives can been seen not in opposition but rather as moving forward in parallel. This parallelism is illustrated with reference to Bolivian struggles against privatisation of water and gas. As prices skyrocketed following a World Bank-advised privatisation, protests began. The key is that these protests were not merely centered around economics or culture/race/civilisation but were about each of these and more. Multiple subjectivities were engaged in the struggle, a diverse collection of ethnic identities from varied socio-economic levels.. The multiplicity of modern workers and working conditions means that a strict understanding of vertically organised classes is no longer functional, and instead needs to be replaced with a notion of the “multitude-form,” which emphasises multiple social singularities in while seeking to “coordinate their common actions and maintain their equality in horizontal organizational structures.” (110). The Bolivian experiences with gas and water are an example of this sort of horizontal integration and are also crucial in seeing altermodernity in terms of the common. First, because these protests were based around ensuring that common resources not be privatised and second because through their organisation the common appears as a social product. The protests that broke out were not spontaneous rebellion, but grew out of existing social networks and practices of self-government.[2]

Rupture and Constitution

The challenge of altermodernity is to both resist modernity’s hierarchies and also to craft alternative social relations based on the common. Thus, altermodernity shares much with, but is fundamentally different from, the perspectives of “hypermodernity,” which posits improving modernity but does not question the hierarchies intrinsic to it, and postmodernity, which, though it celebrates historical rupture, is largely a negative construction that finds it difficult to grasp resistance and move beyond modernity.

Altermodernity is a profound rupture. It is grounded in the struggles of antimodernity, but it also breaks with them by striving toward alternatives instead of stopping at resistance. Hardt and Negri propose three lines of investigation in order to construct a definition of altermodernity.

1)      An alternative line within European enlightenment that traces connections between Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Marx. This is the line that searches for absolute democracy and the desire to free humanity from domination but which has been submerged and made unrecognisable by the dominant transcendental formation of European enlightenment.

2)      The line of thought and action that derives from worker’s revolts and breaks from notions of modernisation and progress. This comes from Marx, Lenin, and Mao, who each struggle with moving away from Eurocentric developmentalist ideologies by focussing at times on powerful antimodern resistance.

3)      The traditions of antimodernity that, though they have often led to the reproduction of modernity’s colonial and racialised hierarchies, contain within them notions of the common as the basis for alternative social relations and forms of life.

Finally, Hardt and Negri suggest that the passage to altermodernity has some import for the role of the contemporary intellectual. First, the intellectual should be able to enact critique and propose alternatives. The intellectual must constantly push forward from rupture with the past. Second, there is no room for intellectual vanguards. Here, the intellectual is envisioned as a militant, neither on the sidelines nor out in front of the multitude, but rather a part of it, involved in a project of co-research and collaboration in order to constantly create the multitude.

[2] This calls to mind Robert Putnam’s work on “social capital,” in which he asserts that the loose bonds of pre-existing social networks (as opposed to the tighter bonds of intimate friendships) are often the most effective when mobilising community efforts.