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)

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.

Preface

In the opening pages of Commonwealth Hardt and Negri claim that the book represents an attempt to “articulate an ethical project, an ethics of democratic political action within and against Empire” (vii). Reiterating their position in Empire and Multitude, they argue that despite the insecurities, conflicts, and contradictions wrought by globalization there is no longer any space “outside” the new global capitalist order. For better or worse, globalization has created a common world. Because there is no longer an outside, creating more sustainable and democratic futures requires acting in this world through new collective projects of self-rule and political invention. CW thus represents Hardt and Negri’s attempt to fully articulate the conditions of possibility for a global democracy of the multitude. Central to CW is the conceptual deployment of the common. By the common Hardt and Nergi refer to the material world as well as to the results of social production—ideas, knowledge, images, and affects. While neoliberal forms of rule have led to the further enclosure of the commons through new strategies of capital accumulation and privatization, Hardt and Negri assert that globalization has also created common spaces and modes of knowledge particularly in the realm of digital communication and cultural production. According to Hardt and Negri, these articulations of the common—while still captured within empire’s distinct alignments of biopolitical production—represent an immanent potentiality for realizing an alternative democratic project: the “becoming-Prince of the multitude”.

Hardt and Negri distinguish their notion of the common from both private and public forms of control and reason. Their mobilization of the common is meant to bypass as well as to cross-cut through this distinction and thus also disarticulate a simplistic and ultimately false choice between capitalism and socialism.

Socialism and capitalism…even though they have at times been mingled together and at other times occasioned bitter conflicts, are both regimes of property that exclude the common. The political project of instituting the common, which we develop in this book, cuts diagonally across these false alternatives—neither private nor public, neither capitalist nor socialist—and opens a new space for politics. (vix)

Hardt and Negri claim that this “new space for politics” is already nascently present within the circuits of contemporary economic and social production. Again this appeal to the potentiality of the “inside” so to speak is what really annoys those like Zizek who can only speak of an alternative politics in terms of negation and appeals to an as yet unrealized “outside”. For Hardt and Negri, as capitalism becomes ever more deterritorialized and reliant on abstract and immaterial forms of production, it requires the generation of common technological and social resources particularly in the abstract domain. Consequently, social life is animated through, invested by, and productive of various and unevenly shared common resources. Thus contemporary capitalism enables an ontology that is at least partially grounded in the common. It is this appeal to subjectivity—its generation and potentiality as a constituent power of the multitude—that frames the central terrain of political struggle in CW.

Hardt and Negri proceed by re-defining and mobilizing two additional concepts in CW: poverty and love. Poverty represents an attempt to grasp the changing dynamics of class composition particularly as globalization recasts relations of power within and between nations. Because of their precarious and marginal status to this order, the poor are obligated to generate alternative frames of the common—informal legal arrangements, modes of production, cultural communication, labor, and tactics of resistance and struggle—these frames represent possibilities for a new constituent power. The notion of love that Hardt and Negri develop is rooted in a re-casting of wealth as tending toward the becoming of desire and the liberating power of shared difference. Hardt and Negri state that these concepts of love and poverty require an intellectual force in order to put them in motion. They locate this force within the multitude itself: “the multitude is a set of singularities that poverty and love compose in the reproduction of the common…we will not pull out of our hats new transcendentals or new definitions of the will to power to impose on the multitude. The becoming-Prince of the multitude is a project that relies entirely on the immanence of decision making within the multitude” (viii).

1.1 The Republic of Property

In this chapter Hardt and Negri begin with a critique of academic discourses centered on the concepts of sovereignty and exceptionality. These points are also developed in more detail in the recent collection of conversations between Negri and Cesar Casarino entitled “It’s a Powerful Life”. The criticism of Agamben and conceptions of sovereignty derived largely from German juridical theorist Carl Schmitt has two sides. First, Hardt and Negri argue that the focus on sovereignty and the authoritarian face of exceptional power tends to obfuscate the utterly naturalized and quotidian structures of power and domination immanent to capitalist society. Through a historical analysis of bourgeoisie constitutionalism they argue that the law and, in effect, modern sovereignty have always been subsumed within a republic of property. Simply stated, the republic of property observes that within modern systems of juridical authority, capital and the law have always implied and inflected one another within a structure of private ownership. These intimate ties extend into the social terrain providing both the transcendent horizon of common sense and the frames of legitimacy behind sovereign force, authority, and power. This analysis is if anything refreshing, providing a necessary counterweight to those projects intent on proving Agamben’s maxim that the camp has become the “biopolitical nomos of modernity”. It also provides a point of departure for conceiving a theoretical basis for alternative politics.

This leads to the second element of their criticism. Hardt and Negri claim that the apocalyptic tone that accompanies Agamben’s singular focus on the negative tendency of biopolitics negates the possibility of conceiving an immanent constituent power. In order to move beyond this negative horizon, Hardt and Negri develop a minor form of Kantian critique. Here they delineate two Kants: (1) a major Kant intent on legitimating the transcendent structure of the republic of property (2) a minor Kant invoked most incisively by Foucault—a Kant for whom transcendental critique translates into a creative questioning of all structures immanent to thought and experience beyond the transcendental plain. They state that “whereas the major Kant provides the instruments to support and defend the republic of property even up to today, the minor Kant helps us see how to overthrow it and construct a democracy of the multitude” (21). This means not only “daring to know” but “knowing how to dare” (i.e. thinking and acting autonomously as a “mature” subject requires the necessity of refusing to obey. This minor tradition of Kantian critique has a distinct Deleuzian flavor. Hardt and Negri mobilize a Kant of invention and creativity meant to provide the intellectual scaffolding to imagine a form of subjectivity, and, in turn, a constituent politics beyond the republic of property. They end the chapter showing the major Kantian inflections of Habermas, Rawls, Giddens, and Beck in order to argue that the reformism advocated by these thinkers remains trapped within the republic of property and therefore cannot adequately provide the conceptual tools to move beyond the existing social order.

1.2 Productive Bodies

This chapter begins by introducing Marx’s critique of the abstract and concrete relations between capital, the law, and alienated social life within the republic of property. They next follow how Marx’s perspectives were extended in the tradition of western Marxism, particularly by the Frankfurt School and Althusser to include a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the effects of the regime of property for human life. For the Frankfurt theorists, this meant attending to the base/superstructure nexus and the dynamics inherent in the real subsumption of social life under capital, and for Althusser it entailed the development of a “scientific” Marxism concerned with deducing the ideological co-ordinates of capitalist reproduction. Hardt and Negri claim that these related theoretical projects represent a “phenomenologization” of critique: an effort to shift theoretical valences from the realm of the transcendental to the immanent and, in turn, to the micro-political fabric weaving together formal legal orders and the ordering of bodies. These points lead Hardt and Negri through a brief trip through the phenomenological tradition. Here Heidegger is the philosopher of negative being who like Agamben fails to provide insight into an affirmative power of life. They then provide a genealogical strand between Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault which recognizes the materially productive elements of being. It is with Foucault’s concept of biopolitics that they locate the most highly developed phenomenology of bodies. They simplify Foucault’s biopolitics through three principles: (1) bodies are the constitutive elements of the biopolitical fabric of being (2) where there is power bodies resist, in this way history is made through the resistance of bodies (3) resistance produces subjectivity in concert with other resistances. All these moves are performed in an effort to locate historical-political transformation at the corporeal level of lived existence—the biopolitical interstices of the multitude. Hardt and Negri claim “that only the standpoint of bodies and their power can challenge the discipline and control of the republic of property” (27).

In the last section of the chapter Hardt and Negri theorize the relation between the body and various fundamentalisms: religious, nationalism, white supremacism, and economism. In each case they argue that these fundamentalisms pose an understanding of the body which makes it disappear. Here the Spinozist influence manifests itself in full form as Hardt and Negri argue that while various fundamentalist truth regimes share a fetishistic concern with the body, particularly its containment, the body is nevertheless only recognized as a stand-in for certain transcendent structures that exist above and beyond the corporeal realm. For instance, racism in its modern variations poses a series of biological essences demarcating a transcendental hierarchy—a white supremacist teleology that stands outside bodies as such. Economism too is obsessed with the productivity of bodies, their capacities for entreprenuerializing risk and so forth. But it isn’t the productive capacity of bodies per se that marks economist fundamentalisms but the interest in the creation of surplus value that exists outside the actual materiality of bodies. In their effort to capture bodies within prescriptive orders, fundamentalisms attempt to deny the affirmative power of bodies to reach beyond given historical limitations. The interesting and important observation here is that the affirmation of bodies in their biopolitical potentiality poses not only a challenge to fundamentalisms, but insight into how various rigid, prescriptive, and ultimately misguided and often dangerous forms of thought might be transformed into alternative constituent forces. For instance, take the Tea Party/Sarah Palin wingnuts in the United States. While their “anger” at “big government” is rooted in a variety of irrational forms of reactionary thought, it would be a mistake to simply write off the movement as their grievances are rooted in very real concrete concerns—unemployment, proliferating insecurities etc. It becomes necessary not only to reject and fight against the transcendental appeals of this movement—vulgar economism, racism, nationalism, patriotism etc—but to develop a biopolitical practice where these grievances might be channeled into critical democratic agencies. Spinoza’s question – why is it that people willingly fight for their own slavery? – must be made subject to examination in all its paradoxical and ironic dimensions thus working to reconnect the dissonances and misinterpretations between cause and effect which muddy and debase contemporary political culture.

1.3 The Multitude of the Poor

This chapter marks an effort to further clarify the political conceptualization of the multitude. Again, the multitude is imagined here as an open and inclusive body that stands in opposition to the republic of property. Hardt and Negri claim that multitude resists the order of property due to their exclusion from it. This exclusion defined as the “poverty” of the multitude is what politically unites its open and disparate elements: its opposition to the republic of property defines the multitude as a radically inclusive composition of bodies. Poverty and exclusion are thus understood as constitutive elements of both the republic of property –providing a wage labor force etc—and the multitude itself which stands against it. “The poor, in other words, refers not to those who have nothing but to the wide multiplicity of all those who are inserted in to the mechanisms of social production regardless of social order of property” (40). It refers to political subjectivities that are radically plural and affirmative and, as such, pose a threat to the striated architecture of property wherever it has historically manifested itself. Hardt and Negri thus proceed by genealogically mapping the concept of the multitude. First, they track the concept in enlightenment political thought (namely Hobbes) where it appears primarily as a negative concept to be tamed through the principals of selective representation, such as through qualifications for political recognition and suffrage through landholder status in English law. Second, in opposition, they draw on Spinoza as the philosopher who most clearly articulates a relationship between poverty and the power of bodies as they strive to affirm possibilities for democratic community. Finally, Hardt and Negri again assert that contemporary conditions of global production have recomposed traditional notions of the working class absorbing all wage laborers and the poor within the dynamics of flexibility and precarity. “The poor, whether they receive wages or not, are located no longer at the historic origin or geographical borders of capitalist production but increasingly at its heart—and thus the multitude of the poor also emerges at the center of the project for revolutionary transformation” (55).

Greetings! Allow us to introduce ourselves: Alex Means, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and Paul Aitken, a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds’s Institute of Communications Studies. We are collaborating on a project to discuss and review Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth, the third installment of their “Empire Trilogy.” In preparation, summary/notes of each section of the book will appear in the Analysis & Commentary section of Critical Stew, and will be cross-posted at Jajuna and Fugitive Imagination. This is in the interest of generating critical conversation about the book and related issues. Unlike these schematic notes the book review will aim to accomplish two things (1) an excavation of some productive criticisms/limitations of Hardt and Negri’s project (2) the creation of something new by thinking with and against Hardt and Negri in the context of our respective intellectual interests. For Alex, this means thinking about what productive insights Commonwealth might contribute to discussions of urbanization, education, and security/insecurity, and for Paul, it means thinking about online communities, internet surveillance, and theories of gifting and exchange. Of course, we hope to also think about how these fields speak to one another, the common, and possibilities for social transformation. This underscores a parallel co-written project that problematizes internet surveillance within higher education through an examination of campus-based corporate anti-piracy campaigns and questions of security and neoliberal governmentality.