PREFACE: LIFE IN COMMON

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, but 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.

 

 

 

This book is the sequel to our book Empire, which focused on the new global form of sovereignty. That book attempted to interpret the tendency of global political order in the course of its formation, that is, to recognize how from a variety of contemporary processes there is emerging a new form of global order that we call Empire. Our point of departure was the recognition that contemporary global order can no longer be understood adequately in terms of imperialism as it was practiced by the modern powers, based primarily on the sovereignty of the nation-state extended over foreign territory. Instead, a “network power,” a new form of sovereignty, is now emerging, and it includes as its primary elements, or nodes, the dominant nation-states along with supranational institutions, major capitalist corporations, and other powers. This network power we claim is “imperial” not “imperialist.” Not all the powers in Empire’s network, of course, are equal—on the contrary, some nation-states have enormous power and some almost none at all, and the same is true for the various other corporations and institutions that make up the network—but despite inequalities they must cooperate to create and maintain the current global order, with all of its internal divisions and hierarchies.

Our notion of Empire thus cuts diagonally across the debates that pose unilateralism and multilateralism or pro-Americanism and anti-Americanism as the only global political alternatives. On the one hand, we argued that no nation-state, not even the most powerful one, not even the United States, can “go it alone” and maintain global order without collaborating with the other major powers in the network of Empire. On the other hand, we claimed that the contemporary global order is not characterized and cannot be sustained by an equal participation of all, or even by the set of elite nation-states, as in the model of multilateral control under the authority of the United Nations. Rather, severe divisions and hierarchies, along regional, national, and local lines, define our current global order. Our claim is not simply that unilateralism and multilateralism as they have been presented are not desirable but rather that they are not possible given our present conditions and that attempts to pursue them will not succeed in maintaining the current global order. When we say that Empire is a tendency we mean that it is the only form of power that will succeed in maintaining the current global order in a lasting way. One might thus respond to the U.S. unilateralist global projects with the ironic injunction adapted from the Marquis de Sade: “Américains, encore un effort si vous voulez être imperials!” (“Americans, you need to try harder if you want to be imperial!”).

Empire rules over a global order that is not only fractured by internal divisions and hierarchies but also plagued by perpetual war. The state of war is inevitable in Empire, and war functions as an instrument of rule. Today’s imperial peace, Pax Imperii, like that in the times of ancient Rome, is a false pretense of peace that really presides over a state of constant war. All of that analysis of Empire and global order, however, was part of the previous book and there is no need for us to repeat it here.

 

 

This book will focus on the multitude, the living alternative that grows within Empire. You might say, simplifying a great deal, that there are two faces to globalization. On one face, Empire spreads globally its network of hierarchies and divisions that maintain order through new mechanisms of control and constant conflict. Globalization, however, is also the creation of new circuits of cooperation and collaboration that stretch across nations and continents and allow an unlimited number of encounters. This second face of globalization is not a matter of everyone in the world becoming the same; rather it provides the possibility that, while remaining different, we discover the commonality that enables us to communicate and act together. The multitude too might thus be conceived as a network: an open and expansive network in which all differences can be expressed freely and equally, a network that provides the means of encounter so that we can work and live in common.

As a first approach we should distinguish the multitude at a conceptual level from other notions of social subjects, such as the people, the masses, and the working class. The people has traditionally been a unitary conception. The population, of course, is characterized by all kinds of differences, but the people reduces that diversity to a unity and makes of the population a single identity: “the people” is one. The multitude, in contrast, is many. The multitude is composed of innumerable internal differences that can never be reduced to a unity or a single identity—different cultures, races, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations; different forms of labor; different ways of living; different views of the world; and different desires. The multitude is a multiplicity of all these singular differences. The masses are also contrasted with the people because they too cannot be reduced to a unity or an identity. The masses certainly are composed of all types and sorts, but really one should not say that different social subjects make up the masses. The essence of the masses is indifference: all differences are submerged and drowned in the masses. All the colors of the population fade to gray. These masses are able to move in unison only because they form an indistinct, uniform conglomerate. In the multitude, social differences remain different. The multitude is many-colored, like Joseph’s magical coat. Thus the challenge posed by the concept of multitude is for a social multiplicity to manage to communicate and act in common while remaining internally different.

Finally, we should also distinguish the multitude from the working class. The concept of the working class has come to be used as an exclusive concept, not only distinguishing the workers from the owners who do not need to work to support themselves, but also separating the working class from others who work. In its most narrow usage the concept is employed to refer only to industrial workers, separating them from workers in agriculture, services, and other sectors; at its most broad, working class refers to all waged workers, separating them from the poor, unpaid domestic laborers, and all others who do not receive a wage. The multitude, in contrast, is an open, inclusive concept. It tries to capture the importance of the recent shifts of the global economy: on the one hand, the industrial working class no longer plays a hegemonic role in the global economy, although its numbers have not decreased worldwide; and on the other hand, production today has to be conceived not merely in economic terms but more generally as social production—not only the production of material goods but also the production of communications, relationships, and forms of life. The multitude is thus composed potentially of all the diverse figures of social production. Once again, a distributed network such as the Internet is a good initial image or model for the multitude because, first, the various nodes remain different but are all connected in the Web, and, second, the external boundaries of the network are open such that new nodes and new relationships can always be added.

Two characteristics of the multitude make especially clear its contribution to the possibility of democracy today. The first might be called its “economic” aspect, except that the separation of economics from other social domains quickly breaks down here. Insofar as the multitude is neither an identity (like the people) nor uniform (like the masses), the internal differences of the multitude must discover the common that allows them to communicate and act together. The common we share, in fact, is not so much discovered as it is produced. (We are reluctant call this the commons because that term refers to pre-capitalist-shared spaces that were destroyed by the advent of private property. Although more awkward, “the common” highlights the philosophical content of the term and emphasizes that this is not a return to the past but a new development.) Our communication, collaboration, and cooperation are not only based on the common, but they in turn produce the common in an expanding spiral relationship. This production of the common tends today to be central to every form of social production, no matter how locally circumscribed, and it is, in fact, the primary characteristic of the new dominant forms of labor today. Labor itself, in other words, tends through the transformations of the economy to create and be embedded in cooperative and communicative networks. Anyone who works with information or knowledge—for example, from agriculturists who develop the specific properties of seeds to software programmers—relies on the common knowledge passed down from others and in turn creates new common knowledge. This is especially true for all labor that creates immaterial projects, including ideas, images, affects, and relationships. We will call this newly dominant model “biopolitical production” to highlight that it not only involves the production of material goods in a strictly economic sense but also touches on and produces all facets of social life, economic, cultural, and political. This biopolitical production and its expansion of the common is one strong pillar on which stands the possibility of global democracy today.

The second characteristic of the multitude especially important for democracy is its “political” organization (but remember that the political blends quickly into the economic, the social, and the cultural). We get a first hint of this democratic tendency when we look at the genealogy of modern resistances, revolts, and revolution, which demonstrates a tendency toward increasingly democratic organization, from centralized forms of revolutionary dictatorship and command to network organizations that displace authority in collaborative relationships. The genealogy reveals a tendency for resistance and revolutionary organizations not only to be a means to achieve a democratic society but to create internally, within the organizational structure, democratic relationships. Furthermore, democracy on a global scale is becoming an increasingly widespread demand, sometimes explicit but often implicit in the innumerable grievances and resistances expressed against the current global order. The common currency that runs throughout so many struggles and movements for liberation across the world today—at local, regional, and global levels—is the desire for democracy. Needless to say, desiring and demanding global democracy do not guarantee its realization, but we should not underestimate the power such demands can have.

Keep in mind that this is a philosophical book. We will give numerous examples of how people are working today to put an end to war and make the world more democratic, but do not expect our book to answer the question, What is to be done? or propose a concrete program of action. We believe that in light of the challenges and possibilities of our world it is necessary to rethink the most basic political concepts, such as power, resistance, multitude, and democracy. Before we embark on a practical political project to create new democratic institutions and social structures, we need to ask if we really understand what democracy means (or could mean) today. Our primary aim is to work out the conceptual bases on which a new project of democracy can stand. We have made every effort to write this in a language that everyone can understand, defining technical terms and explaining philosophical concepts. That does not mean that the reading will always be easy. You will undoubtedly at some point find the meaning of a sentence or even a paragraph not immediately clear. Please be patient. Keep reading. Sometimes these philosophical ideas take longer to work out. Think of the book as a mosaic from which the general design gradually emerges.

 

 

We conceive the movement from the one book to the other, from Empire to Multitude, as the reverse of Thomas Hobbes’s development from his De Cive (published in 1642) to Leviathan (1651). The reverse progression speaks to the profound difference in the two historical moments. At the dawn of modernity, in De Cive, Hobbes defined the nature of the social body and the forms of citizenship that were adequate to the nascent bourgeoisie. The new class was not capable of guaranteeing social order on its own; it required a political power to stand above it, an absolute authority, a god on earth. Hobbes’s Leviathan describes the form of sovereignty that would subsequently develop in Europe in the form of the nation-state. Today, at the dawn of postmodernity, we have first in Empire tried to delineate a new global form of sovereignty; and now, in this book, we try to understand the nature of the emerging global class formation, the multitude. Whereas Hobbes moved from the nascent social class to the new form of sovereignty, our course is the inverse—we work from the new form of sovereignty to the new global class. Whereas the nascent bourgeoisie needed to call on a sovereign power to guarantee its interests, the multitude emerges from within the new imperial sovereignty and points beyond it. The multitude is working through Empire to create an alternative global society. Whereas the modern bourgeois had to fall back on the new sovereignty to consolidate its order, the postmodern revolution of the multitude looks forward, beyond imperial sovereignty. The multitude, in contrast to the bourgeoisie and all other exclusive, limited class formations, is capable of forming society autonomously; this, we will see, is central to its democratic possibilities.

We cannot begin our book with the project of the multitude and the possibilities of democracy. That will be the focus of chapters 2 and 3. We have to begin instead with the current state of war and global conflict, which can easily seem to be an insurmountable obstacle to democracy and liberation. This book was written under the cloud of war, primarily between September 11, 2001, and the 2003 Iraq War. We have to investigate how war has changed in our era with respect to politics and sovereignty, and we have to articulate the contradictions that run throughout our present war regime. We hope, however, that it is already clear that democracy, even when it appears distant, is necessary in our world, that it is the only answer to the vexing questions of our day, and that it is the only way out of our state of perpetual conflict and war. It is up to us in the remainder of this book to convince you that a democracy of the multitude is not only necessary but possible.