Multitude
The Concept
See also the entry on: Multitudes
Description
Akseli Virtanen:
"Multitude is not a poetic notion, but the simple name of the productive singularities whose productivity cannot be reduced to actual production. Paraphrasing Marx, we might call it ‘living labour’. As a power, which is not reducible to any specific act, to any specific mode of existence or to any historical time, living labour is multitude’s mode of being. It is activity that does not materialize into machinery or products but rather retreats from materiality and turning into actual products. This is precisely how we might describe the transformation of economy: from the confined or restricted economy where it was necessary to distinguish between work and leisure, production and reproduction, life and politics to general economy; where factory-office and its borders have dissolved into society; where the “foundation of productivity is no longer in the capitalistic investment but in the investment of the social brains... where the maximal amount of freedom and the breaking of the disciplinary relations becomes the absolute foundation of creating wealth” (Negri, 1998: 139-140). Thus, to ask ‘what is multitude?’ means not to affirm ‘the end of work’ nor, on the contrary, to announce that ‘everything has become work’, but rather to change the principles of assessment, to change the way of conceiving the ‘the value of value’. This revaluation is not a solution to a problem but rather an opening of potential: it reveals the nature of multitude as a question. Without this questioning multitude will remain abstract, deprived of meaning."
(http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/4-3virtanen.pdf)
The Book
The follow-up of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's classic book on globalization and the multitudes, Empire.
Here's a review of the book Multitude by Pierre Macherey, in French:
http://www.univ-lille3.fr/set/machereynegricadreprinicpal.html
Review
Samir Amin: The Multitude—Constituting Democracy or Reproducing Capital’s Hegemony?
"The liberal ideology specific to capitalism places the individual in the forefront. It does not matter that in its historical construction during the Enlightenment the individual in question had to be an educated and property-owning man, a bourgeois capable, as a result, of making free use of Reason. This was an indestructible liberating advance. As a movement beyond capitalism, socialism cannot be conceived of as a return to the past, as a negation of the individual. Bourgeois democracy, despite the narrow limits in which capitalism encloses it, is not “formal,” but quite real, even if it remains incomplete. Socialism will be democratic or it will not be. But I add to this phrase its necessary complement: there will be no more democratic progress without calling capitalism into question. Democracy and social progress are inseparable. The really existing socialisms of the past certainly did not respect this requirement and thought they could achieve progress without democracy or with as little democracy as in capitalism itself. But it is also necessary to add that the great majority of democracy’s defenders today are hardly more demanding and think that democracy is possible without any visible social progress, let alone calling into question the principles of capitalism. Do Hardt and Negri leave this category of liberal democracy behind?
The individualist basis of liberal ideology establishes the individual as the subject of history in the last resort. That assertion is not true, neither for the history of earlier systems (which by the Enlightenment definition were unaware of the individual) nor even for the history of capitalism, which is a system based on the conflict between classes, the true subjects of this chapter of history. But the individual would be able to become the subject of history in a future advanced socialism.
Hardt and Negri think that we have arrived at this historical turning point, that classes (along with nations or peoples) are no longer the subjects of history. Instead the individual has become such (or is in the process of becoming such). This turning point gives rise to the formation of what they call the “multitude,” defined in terms of the “totality of productive and creative subjectivities.”
Why and how would this turning point occur? Hardt and Negri’s texts are quite vague on these questions. They talk about the transition to “cognitive capitalism” or the emergence of “immaterial production,” the new “networked” society or “deterritorialization.” They make reference to Foucault’s propositions concerning the transition from the disciplinary society to the society of control. Everything that has been said over the past thirty years, whether good or bad, depending on one’s viewpoint, whether indisputable because platitudinous or strongly debatable, is thrown pell-mell into a great pot in preparation for the future. A compendium of current fashions does not easily lead to conviction. The similarity to the theses formulated by Manuel Castells concerning the “networked society” and to the ideas popularized by Jeremy Rifkin, Robert B. Reich, and other American popularizers is such that one is entitled to pose the question: what is new and important in all this hodgepodge of ideas?
I will propose then another hypothesis to account for the invention of the “multitude” in question. Our moment is one of defeat for the powerful social and political movements that shaped the twentieth century (workers’, socialist, and national liberation movements). The loss of perspective that any defeat involves leads to ephemeral unrest and the profusion of para-theoretical propositions that both legitimate that unrest and give rise to the belief that it constitutes an “effective” means for “transforming the world” (even without wanting to), in the good sense of the term moreover. One can only gradually solidify new formulations that are both coherent and effective by distancing oneself from the past, rather than proposing a “remake” of it, and by effectively integrating new realities produced by social evolution in all its dimensions. Such contributions, both debatable and diverse, certainly exist. I do not include Hardt and Negri’s discourse among them.
The propositions that Hardt and Negri draw from their discourse on the “multitude” bear witness, even in their very formulation, to the impasse in which they are trapped. The first of these propositions concerns democracy that, for the first time in history, is supposedly on the verge of becoming a real possibility on the global scale. Moreover, the multitude is defined as the “constitutive” force of democracy. This is a wonderfully naïve proposition. Are we moving in this direction? Beyond a few superficial appearances (some elections here or there), which obviously satisfy the liberal powers (particularly Washington), democracy—both necessary and possible—is in crisis. It is threatened with losing its legitimacy to the advantage of religious or ethnic fundamentalisms (I do not consider the ethnocratic regimes of the former Yugoslavia as democratic progress!). Do elections that overturn the power of one criminal gang (for example, one in the service of the Russian autocracy) to replace it with another one (financed by the CIA!) constitute progress for democracy or a manipulated farce? Is not the unfolding of the imperialist project for control of the planet at the origin of the frontal attacks that are reducing basic democratic rights in the United States? Is not the liberal consensus in Europe, around which the major political forces of right and left have united, in the process of delegitimizing electoral procedures? Hardt and Negri are silent on all these questions.
The second proposition concerns the “diversity of the multitude.” But the forms and contents that define the (diverse) components of the multitude are barely specified any more than are the forces that produce and/or reduce this diversity. Major contradictions consequently traverse all of Hardt and Negri’s texts. For example, the current globalization, according to them, is supposed to reduce the “differences” between centers and peripheries (otherwise this globalization would remain imperialist). The real world is evolving in the exact opposite direction by accentuating “differences” and constructing apartheid on a world scale. The diversity within the local components of the system cited by Hardt and Negri (in fact only in North American and Western European societies) is itself of a “diverse” nature: there are (sometimes, as in the United States) ethnic or para-ethnic “communities,” there are diverse religious or linguistic regions, there are also classes, perhaps (!), that it would be good to redefine on the basis of the transformation of social realities! Even when all these diversities have been lined up, nothing much has been said. How are they articulated with one another in the production, reproduction, and transformation of social systems? It is impossible to respond to these fundamental questions without conceptualizing what I call “political cultures.” There are serious and positive contributions in these areas also. Certainly, they are debatable, but they cannot be ignored. Hardt and Negri have contributed nothing here that one can mention in support of their thesis.
The reversal establishing the individual as the subject of history and the multitude as the constitutive force of its democratic project is an “idealist” invention. It supposes that a reversal has occured in the world of ideas without a transformation of real social relations. I am not suggesting here that ideas are always only passive reflections of reality. I have developed the opposite point of view, founded on the recognition of the autonomy of “instances.” Ideas can be in advance of their time. The question here does not concern this general proposition. It concerns postmodernist ideas in vogue today (inclusive of the ideas of Hardt and Negri themselves): are they in advance of their time? Or are they only the naïve, confused, and contradictory expression of the reality of the moment, a moment of defeat not yet surpassed? In these conditions the “multitude” may become a constitutive reality of indecisive, various, and disjointed “diversities.” It can take on the appearance of acting as a “real force” (a strong electoral majority, for example). But this is no more than ephemeral, destined to give way to a contradictory articulated structure, as always in history. In several years, the page of the “multitude” will probably have turned, as happened with the workerism (opéraïsme) of the 1970s and for the same reason: the fixation on the partial and the ephemeral, as noted by Atilio Boron in Empire and Imperialism (Zed Books, 2005).
The political culture that stands out behind Hardt and Negri’s discourse is that of American liberalism. This political culture considers the American Revolution and the Constitution adopted at that time as the decisive event in the opening of modernity. Hannah Arendt, the inspiration for Hardt and Negri, writes that this revolution opens the era of the “unlimited quest for political liberty.” Today, the emergence of the multitude, the constitutive force of a democracy “possible for the first time on the world scale,” crowns the (positive) victory of the “Americanization of the world.”
The rallying to American liberalism is necessarily accompanied by the devaluation of the different paths of other nations, in particular of “old Europe,” as formulated by Hannah Arendt when she counterposed the American Revolution to the “limited struggle against poverty and inequality” to which she reduces the French Revolution. In the Cold War era, all the great revolutions of modern times (French, Russian, and Chinese) had to be denigrated. They were vitiated from the beginning by their “totalitarian tendency,” according to the American liberal discourse that became the spearhead of the counterrevolution after the Second World War. The exclusive survival of the “American model,” whose pioneering revolution and constitution did not question any of the necessities of capitalist development, implied that the heritage of those revolutions that had indeed questioned capitalist exigencies (as was the case beginning with the Jacobin radicalization of the French Revolution) was repudiated. The denunciation of the French Revolution (François Furet), banal anti-Sovietism, and the charges brought against Maoism constitute some of the major planks of this counterrevolution in political culture.
Now in this area Hardt and Negri remain utterly silent. They systematically ignore all the critical literature (a large part of it from the United States, moreover) on the American Revolution that established a long time ago that the Constitution of the United States was systematically constructed to rule out all danger of a “popular” deviation. The success in this sense is real, arousing the envy of all the European reactionaries who never succeeded in doing it (Giscard d’Estaing said that the constitution of the ultra-liberal European project was “as good” as the U.S. Constitution!).
The “aspirations” of the multitude established as the constitutive force of the future are reduced to very little: freedom, particularly to emigrate, and the right to a socially guaranteed income. In the undoubted care not to venture outside what is permitted by American liberalism, the project deliberately ignores everything that could be qualified as the heritage of the workers’ and socialist movement, in particular the equality rejected by the political culture of the United States. It is difficult to believe in the transformative power of an emerging global (and European) citizenship while the policies implemented fundamentally deprive citizenship of its effectiveness.
The construction of a real alternative to the contemporary system of globalized liberal capitalism involves other requirements, in particular the recognition of the gigantic variety of needs and aspirations of the popular classes throughout the world. In fact, Hardt and Negri experience much difficulty in imagining the societies of the periphery (85 percent of the human population). The debates concerning the tactics and strategy of building a democratic and progressive alternative that would be effective in the concrete and specific conditions of the different countries and regions of the world never appear to have interested them. Would the “democracy” promoted by the intervention of the United States permit going beyond an electoral farce like the one in the Ukraine, for example? Can one reduce the rights of the “poor” who people the planet to the right to “emigrate” to the opulent West? A socially guaranteed income may be a justifiable demand. But can one have the naiveté to believe that its adoption would abolish the capitalist relation, which allows capital to employ labor (and, consequently, to exploit and oppress it), to the advantage of the worker who would from that point on be in a position to use capital freely and so be able to affirm the potential of his or her creativity?
The reduction of the subject of history to the “individual” and the uniting of such individuals into a “multitude” dispose of the true questions concerning the reconstruction of subjects of history equal to the challenges of our era. One could point to many other important contributions to oppose to the silence of Hardt and Negri on this subject. Undoubtedly, historic socialisms and communisms had a tendency to reduce the major subject of modern history to the “working class.” Moreover, this is a reproach that could be leveled at the Negri of workerism. In counterpoint, I have proposed an analysis of the subject of history as formed from particular social blocs capable, in successive phases of popular struggle, of effectively transforming the social relations of force to the advantage of the dominated classes and peoples.
At the present time, to take up the challenge implies that one is moving forward in the formation of democratic, popular, and national hegemonic blocs capable of overcoming the powers exercised by both the hegemonic imperialist blocs and the hegemonic comprador blocs. The formation of such blocs takes place in concrete conditions that are very different from one country to another so that no general model (whether in the style of the “multitude” or some other) makes sense. In this perspective, the combination of democratic advances and social progress will be part of the long transition to world socialism, just as the affirmation of the autonomy of peoples, nations, and states will make it possible to substitute a negotiated globalization for the unilateral globalization imposed by dominant capital (which Empire praises!) and thus gradually deconstruct the current imperialist system. The deepening of debates on these real questions is, without a doubt, far more promising than pursuing the examination of what the “multitude” could be."
(https://monthlyreview.org/2005/10/01/empire-and-multitude/)
More Information
- Empire
- The concept: Multitudes
- Paola Virno's Grammar of the Multitude
- Related concept: Exodus