Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri - Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri
Multitude.. represents an important advance in our attempts to make sense of the profound societal shifts accompanying the rise of network forms of both resistance and control, and the possibilities for a better world that these shifts might enable.5 And Multitude actually stands alone quite well: if you’ve never cracked Empire but are curious, Multitude is a good place to start. If you picked up a copy of Empire a couple of years back and stalled 60 pages in, but remain interested in the ideas it grapples with, Multitude merits a look. If you read Empire and were excited by the ideas, but just wished sometimes they could express them a little more clearly, or relate them more directly to real world struggles, Multitude is the book you’ll wish they’d written first... (from the review by D. Oswald Mitchell)
One approach to understanding the democracy of the multitude is as an open-source society, that is, a society whose source code is revealed so that we can all work collaboratively to solve its bugs - Hardt and Negri, Multitude
(Extracts): The possibility of democracy on a global scale is
emerging today for the very first time. This book is about that possibility,
about what we call the project of the multitude. The project of the multitude
not only expresses the desire for a world of equality and freedom, not only
demands an open and inclusive democratic global society, but also provides the
means for achieving it. That is how our book will end, bur it cannot begin
there.
Today the possibility of democracy is obscured and
threatened by the seemingly permanent state of conflict across the world. Our
book must begin with this state of war. Democracy, it is true, remained an
incomplete project throughout the modern era in all its national and local
forms, and certainly the processes of globalization in recent decades have
added new challenges, but the primary obstacle to democracy is the global state
of war. In our era of armed globalization, the modern dream of democracy may
seem to have been definitively lost.
War has always been incompatible with democracy.
Traditionally, democracy has been suspended during wartime and power entrusted temporarily to a strong
central authority to confront the crisis. Because the current state of war is
both global in scale and long lasting, with no end in sight, the suspension of democracy
too becomes indefinite or even permanent. War takes on a generalized character,
strangling all social life and posing its own political order. Democracy thus
appears to be entirely irretrievable, buried deep beneath the weapons and
security regimes of our constant state of conflict. Yet never has democracy
been more necessary. No other path will provide a way out of the fear,
insecurity, and domination that permeates our world at war; no other path will lead us to a peaceful
life in common…
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Nothing annoys our economist friends more than
reminding them that economics is a deeply reactionary discipline. Really ever since
it was born between Scotland
and France
As in Aristotle's world, for the economists, matter and
form, movement and ends are necessarily compatible and united. For this reason
economics, despite the appearance of constant movement, is really completely fixed and static. It is no
coincidence that French physiocrats and Scottish moralists were the first to formulate the
presuppositions of the analytic that would become in the course of a century the neoclassical "general theory of
equilibrium." It was inevitable that statisticians and mathematicians would
take over economics because they are the only ones with the techniques to manage it. The calculations and models are every day a
confirmation, beyond the academic libraries and government dossiers of the
utopia of political reaction. Why reaction?
Because the reproduction of
society is analysed with the goal of keeping it exactly as is and formulating
it in terms of quantitative measures that can make the relations of
exploitation inevitable and natural, an ontological necessity. Economics is
more disciplinary than any other discipline, and it has been ever since its
origins. In the course of modernity, proceeding toward our times, there emerge
more and more phenomena and institutions that do not square with the equilibria
of the good and happy science of economics..
Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri - Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
