3 - Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri built a genealogy of modern resistance gathering the forms of insurgency and revolt present in recent history. For them, what we have seen over the last few decades is that the legitimation of the global order is based ultimately on war and the efforts made to understand the counterinsurgency to date pose the insurgency responding to it in our understanding of war. We were looking from the counterinsurgency perspective, but for the authors, we should change this logic to recognize the powerful and wanted forms of rebellion and revolution; they proposed to look for resistance first (64). They argue that the understanding of the genealogy of resistance will provide us a new vision of the world and its subjectivities.

Hardt and Negri put military questions intrinsic connected with cultural, economic, politic and social demands. To comprehend the subjectivities of resistance the authors studied the systems of production and reproduction where people are integrated. The production of immaterial products, such as knowledge, images, and affects are changing the contemporary labor (65) For Negri and Hardt, immaterial labor is biopolitical considering that it is creating different forms of social life. Biopolitical production is part of the social and creates relationship trough collaborative forms of labor; It creates subjectivities and the social basis that enables the project of the multitude (66).

The authors considered three main changes in insurgency movements in history. The first fundamental change of modern civil war was the passage of a dispersed rebel force into a centralized one (70,1). These movements changing were part of an effort to unify social classes around a common politic proposal. However, this centralized model of people’s army was criticized for being vulnerable and ineffective. The forms of authority that they were fighting against appeared again inside the movements of insurgency themselves. The people’s army configuration changes again after a long cycle of struggles occurred in the late 1960s (80). The guerillas and rebellions used the network of communication, information, and cooperation as models for their organizational structure. The polycentric tendency of earlier rebellions was established again. The use of Internet and communication tools enables the interaction between the guerrilla movements outside and also as an organizational element within their structure. All these changes culminate in the third transition from a polycentric model toward the distributed network structure (86). After 1980, the multitude struggles brought together movements that have different concerns to fight for their common interest. “The movement of movements” is how they call the organization of their movements to act together based on their connections. Currently, these tree principles overlap turning movements of insurgency into a powerful structure to oppose the power in command. This network body is the multitude.

Finally, Hardt and Negri recognized that to understand the genealogy of resistance looking only at the form is not sufficient (93). We have also to consider the content related to their actions.  The authors posit that the democracy should be considered not just by form, but also by the social contents originating from how people relate to each other and how people produce together. For them, the biopolitical products rule people’s lives, involving and connecting them altogether.

 Work cited:

 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Resistance,” Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 63-95.