Often we suspect there is something ‘rotten’ in our global order and only an urgent adjustment can save us from calamity. But we are unable to articulate or convert our suspicions into logical concepts expressed in the context of past and current political and economic evolutions.
In their brilliant analytical volume ‘Multitude’ two leading modern philosophers, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, have come to our aid. Their book not only debunks the perilous policies of our runaway capitalism but exposes the blatant injustices of a global order designed to make the rich richer at the expense of an ever growing multitude of poor and marginalized. This excluded multitude constitutes a surplus of labor and intelligence, a reservoir of revolutionary energy that will, sooner or later, confront the neo-colonization of the United States, a country once considered the champion of liberty but now a fierce opponent of any democratic or environmental reforms.
Unlike Marxism ‘Multitude’ does not advocate a revolution in which one class (the industrial working class) becomes the dominant power but advocates a universal movement in which the multitude finds a truly representative voice through new legal frameworks and the inversion of the neo-liberal ideology to privatize or patent what really belongs to all humanity. This movement of the multitude must not aim for yet another concentric power structure but for the right to diversity.
Such vision is anathema to ‘globalization’ which basically sees the world guided by a Consortium of dominant nations led by the U.S. Yet the diversity concept and the right to ‘common’ ownership of human knowledge already propel the anti-globalization movements. Theirs is not a protest against closer global co-operation but against the dominance of global affairs and the acquisition of global resources and markets by the Consortium and its corporate backers.
Negri and Hardt are not naïve. They realize current power structures will not yield passively to a reduction or loss of absolute dominance. But their vision of power of the Multitude rests on the concept of diverse ‘movements’ propelled by the growing plight and restlessness of the world’s poor, the unemployed and unemployable, the millions of underpaid workers, the movement of labor and migrants, in short the multitude of human beings exploited by political and economic policies designed to impose ever tighter private ownership over the world’s resources, virtually designating those left on the fringe, whether in Asia, Africa or the ghettoes of American cities, to the garbage bins of our system.
There is no doubt, even though the philosophers do not spell this out, the system will defend itself, as it already does, through a ‘permanent war’ that can be extended at unilateral level to combat not only so-called ‘terrorists’ but any group or movement threatening the system’s dominance by clamoring for a more egalitarian distribution and the sharing of ‘the common’. It is no accident our western governments mobilize special security forces to beat up demonstrators at global economic forums where the serfs of power elaborate new methods to regulate and increase the wealth of the few. Nor is it an accident, as Negri and Hardt point out, that these serfs gravitate between the board rooms and politics.
The inevitable result of the ‘war’ against any opposition will galvanize even more resistance, as we have already seen by the snowballing anti-global and Social Forum movements or in Iraq where a conflict peddled as a war of liberation and pro-democratic values has unshackled a wave of new ‘terrorism’ and with it the threat to the very lifeblood of the capitalist system – the supply of oil.
There are two important concepts that permeate ‘Multitude’: The degeneration of pseudo-democratic capitalism and the creativity and growing political consciousness of the poor, the exploited labor force, in short the multitude.
History teaches us most empires imploded long before ‘barbarian’ forces gave them the coup d’ grace. Today, the life span of imperial existence has been shortened by the revolution in communications. Easy contact now unites the globe. One protest stimulates another elsewhere. Ideas are quickly transmitted and transplanted.
Negri and Hardt point out a significant sign of imperial decline is when an empire employs mercenaries to fight its wars and preserve its security. Such wars are no longer fought with patriotic fervor but with unfettered material ambitions. The fighting forces are no longer subjected to a central discipline.
Perusing the list and images of U.S. troops killed in Iraq one can not help but wonder at the number of Hispanics and African-American casualties from the poor sector of society, soldiers who have obviously joined the military as a means to obtain a sponsored education and an income. At the same time the bulk of supplies and infrastructure of the war machine in Iraq is protected by civilian mercenaries (security guards) recruited from around the world or by Iraqi hirelings dubbed ‘collaborators’ by the insurgents.
On the other hand the world’s poor at the bottom end of society have developed, through necessity and marginalization, an individual ingenuity and creativity. This offers them a superior armor for survival and better assets as achievers. These qualities become utilized when such people move into more affluent societies as migrants or short-term workers. As they did in their own environment - where they often lived from what nature could provide - these newcomers can rake out an existence on a basic fare that would doom most ‘civilized’ beings in the industrialized nations. But once offered an image of ‘the other’ world through communications and migration the poor feel justified to demand their share and a more egalitarian distribution. In fact the ‘import’ of labor and South-North migration is certain to play a major role in the reforms if not in the ‘revolution’ facing our current and, hopefully, moribund global order.
With the empirical logic that characterizes their work, Negri and Hardt subtly warn of the ‘monster’ within Multitude, the unleashed fury of a Frankenstein who, like other monsters, basically wants to be loved, to share in the common welfare, in short be part of the rest of humanity.
This ‘monster’ has many faces.
“Al-Qaeda attacks the global political body in order to resuscitate older regional social and political bodies under the control of religious authority, whereas the globalization struggle challenge the global political body in order to create a freer, more democratic global world,” the two men write.
The clash between those anxious to preserve the status quo and those clamoring for reform or change has already been pioneered in Argentina, in Chiapas and in the global social forums whose numbers grow each year despite ever more brutal repression. Their struggles are contagious, mobilized by communication.
But the ‘monster’ can be brutal. The warning signs are already there in the violent ethnic bloodbaths in Yugoslavia where ethnic majorities fought against dominance by ethnic minorities in a monstrous war of fratricide along ethnic lines. The same kind of war, even more vicious, exploded in Rwanda. In Asia economic recession in the late 1990s led to the mass rapes and killings of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia and the kidnap-for-ransom of ethnic Chinese in the Philippines as the multitude took out its frustration on the dominant economic class, the ethnic Chinese minority, the so-called Bamboo Network that controls the bulk of production and wealth in South-East Asia. (It has been estimated some seven per cent of ethnic Chinese in the Asia-Pacific region control two thirds of that region’s wealth and assets.) In South America a similar disproportionate division of property has already swept to power new populist governments in Venezuela and Brazil and smashed the seven decade long power of the ruling party in Mexico.
“Deprivation may breed anger, indignation and antagonism,” ‘Multitude explains: “But revolt arrives only on the basis of wealth - that is a surplus of intelligence, experience, knowledge and desires. When we propose the poor as the paradigmatic subjective figure of labor today, it is not that the poor are empty and excluded from wealth but because they are included in the circuits of production and full of potential, which always exceeds what capital and the global political body can expropriate and control. This common surplus is the first pillar on which are built struggles against the global political body and for the multitude.”
Like most critics of the global order ‘Multitude’ argues at the root of this global imbalance are the trade policies of the dominant nations coupled with new laws of copyright and patents. These are responsible for amassing ever more wealth and ‘common’ resources in the hands of transnational corporations and private individuals.
“Those who advocate freeing markets or trade from State control are not really asking for ‘less’ political control but merely a ‘different kind’ of political control…..all the proponents of free markets know deep down that only political regulation and force allow for the free market….” Negri and Hardt wrote.
The two men pull no punches. They dismiss economists as the servants of the capitalist system, restoring derailed monetary and trade trends back on the track most beneficial to their masters. They describe the World Trade Organization (WTO) as ‘a real forum for the global aristocracy’ and see the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank as ‘supranational institutions’ constrained by their own regulations to reproduce the current global order by pre-emptying substantial reforms. They argue government offices and corporate offices resemble each other more and more and military action has been designed to open ‘unwilling markets.’
But it is not such slogans, often used by opponents of globalization, but the depth of research and arguments that make ‘Multitude’ such a spell-binding Manifest on the weaknesses of our current international order where corruption has become endemic among the dominant nations – who, like the hypocrites they are, attribute this phenomenon exclusively to the under-developed world.
‘Multitude’ views the sale of services and assets that were considered public property in the now defunct welfare state as one of the main roots of our current global malaise in which more and more ‘common’ assets have been usurped by private capital. These acquisitions range from the postal service to communications, parks, education, prisons and railroads. The authors believe ‘exploitation’ today is the control of the common by capital and argue the trend must be reversed by returning to public or ‘common’ control essential services and assets.
While the State is supposed to guarantee essential services, electricity, water, energy and public transport to the less fortunate of its citizen the capitalist is only interested in profits, one reason why the British corporation that took over water distribution in South Africa installed coin-operated water-meters in the homes of impoverished slum dwellers who were unable to pay their water bill. This in turn forced the poor to scavenge for water from drainage pipes with the inevitable result of disease and deaths.
In this way the symbiosis of State and capital has become a blatant exercise in exploitation: While the State apparatus enriches itself through the sale of assets and services the capitalist system enriches itself through the exploitation of these acquisitions.
Perhaps, one feels, one way to solve the imbalance of services like water supply would be to lower or offer free of charge drinking water to the poor while increasing the water levies for the more affluent members of society who often hose their gardens while a few miles away slum dwellers scavenge liquid from drain pipes. But such a utopian use of a basic resource would require that the assets remain under State control.
In fact developing countries are virtually forced to privatize their assets, offering foreign interests a share in their resources in return for development loans or the bailing out of their economies. The irony of this system is the servicing of these loans alone keeps the debtor nation in perpetual indebtedness. This loan-for-concessions system, designed to maintain the division of wealth “is a perfect recipe for desperate violent acts,” Multitude warns.
The new flexible and mobile labor force has destroyed the old tradition of stable employment and as Negri and Hardt point out “a set of skills that allowed workers to develop and take pride in a coherent lifelong career with durable social connection centered on their jobs.”
The answer is not a return to old values since one can hardly turn back – or wishes to turn back history - but to go forward into a new era with a new legal, economic and social framework that must ensure a more even and just distribution of our human and natural resources if the ‘monster’ within multitude is to be pacified.
Unlike the worker of the past the new labor force requires the ability to adapt constantly to changing market requirements. This trend has converted today’s work force into individuals utilizing their spare time to learn, create and reflect without the remunerative benefits that should accrue from such additional activities which ‘Multitude’ defines as ‘immaterial labor.’
The ambition of today’s global order, so the two philosophers argue, is to make all social activity public and subject all economic activity to control (and surveillance) through property rights, i.e. copyright and patents. This legal framework elaborated by the dominant forces has privatized water, air, land, health care and pensions, services previously considered state functions during the short era of the welfare state.
And since capital is only interested in profits many of these services have been run into the ground, with a minimum of maintenance and expansion (example: the U.K. railway services) often forcing the state to take them back under its wings or bail them out. The privatization of national telecommunication networks, for example, has created strong opposition since the private owners are unlikely to extend the network into the small far-flung rural communities whose revenue - at least on the short term bases on which most privateers operate - is unlikely to cover the cost of expansion.
In the under-developed part of the globe transnational corporations have bought up the diverse local products that made up the native food chain, replacing them with a monopoly of their own products. Farmers are forced to buy seeds from transnational companies whose genetically modified seeds are the only ones available after local seed producers were bought out or went bankrupt in the initial price war when these trans-nationals, not unlike drug pushers, offered free seeds to ‘addict’ the user (who then paid through the nose later). These monopolies constantly reduce the diversity and choice to which the human species is entitled and leaves the food chain at the mercy of the proprietors of patents, now able to impose taste, cost and quality without competition – or the quality checks their trans-national nature avoids.
Some of these monopolies, like powdered milk, have already been challenged for marketing their products as a healthy alternative to mother’s milk, a claim now dismissed by non-corporate scientists.
‘Multitude’ challenges the patent and copyright claims. It attributes discoveries and genetic codes to the collective knowledge of humanity and finds it ludicrous that someone who has used collective knowledge to produce a new species of plant life or product should be awarded a global patent for what is labeled a ‘discovery.’ These products of accumulated human knowledge must remain collective and can not be owned by individuals or groups who exploit what is common heritage for their own lucre.
“Perhaps some day in the future we will look back and see how stupid we were in this period to let private property monopolize so many forms of wealth, posing obstacles to innovation and corrupting life, before we discovered to entrust social life entirely to the common,” ‘Multitude says.
The concept of multitude may sound utopian and unmanageable to the majority of us, indoctrinated for millenniums by the concept of sovereignty and the pyramid of power. What Negri and Hardt basically advocate is an inversion of this pyramid, turning it upside down to create a structure in which diverse societies, all defending their own diversity, collaborate on common projects through a global networking system and with the help of a new legal and democratic framework.
Already the pioneers of this still pacific revolution are the diverse movements who collaborate in the escalating anti-global protests. These movements, though often asymmetric in their agendas, have not created a hierarchical structure as yet. The danger to these protest movements is that they may be hijacked by the advocates of power structures. Look how easily the U.S. wrested an unexpected global outpouring of compassion for the victims of the Asian tsunami from the ‘diverse’ charities and NGOs best suited to address the calamity. Within days an emergency summit in Jakarta and visits by senior western politicians - highlighted ad infinitum by the mass media, the serfs of power - made it appear as if the rich nations, who were initially slow to respond, had taken over and were now managing what was originally a populist solidarity movement generated by unprecedented generosity from the multitude. One is sure to see in future similar attempts to snatch leadership away from any populist initiative so these initiatives can be gradually guided back to fit into the status quo.
The vehicle for hijacking populist action is the United Nations. Despite its grand agenda the U.N. is basically an extended arm of U.S. power. As the major donor to the organization the U.S. can open and close the taps of finance at will, bending the world body to its wishes. If all else fails Washington can simply use its veto in the Security Council.
The U.N. badly needs a ‘democratic’ face lift to become effective and truly representative. But then so does our own democratic system, so degenerated that voter apathy has become a chronic malaise since the choice is often no more then the choice between two or more of the same evil.
‘Multitude’ suggests not only drastic reforms in the U.N. system but accountability and transparency of the IMF and the World Bank, the abolition of the veto in the U.N. Security Council and the conversion of the U.N. General Assembly into a directly elected body with seats allotted in proportion to a country’s population. It also advocates the extension of the International Criminal Court with global jurisdiction and a Global Truth Commission to determine penalties and reparations claims, from the Holocaust to the illegality of Guantanamo Bay.
Ironically the main obstacle to such democratic reforms is the U.S. Washington has rejected virtually all major reform initiatives over recent years including the Kyodo accord on gas emissions (2001) and the Landmine Ban Treaty (1997). The U.S. pulled out of nuclear disarmament talks and rejected the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.
In fact the two philosophers point out that the war against “the Axis of Evil” contains subtle warnings to Europe and Russia that by controlling Iraq’s energy resources the U.S. can control its main competitor - European industry (through energy supply) and weaken Russia’s sphere of influence in the South. At the same time the war threatens China’s sphere of influence by including North Korea in the ‘Axis’ and thus provides the rationale for a stronger U.S. military presence in East Asia.
But there is a kink in the superior military arsenal and technology of a superpower, virtually powerless to prevent the new phenomenon of suicide attacks carried out by those who believe life must be sacrificed to challenge the sovereignty of a superior force. Even Israel, a small nation with the world’s best security apparatus, has been unable over the years to prevent Palestinian suicide attacks against its population.
In a pragmatic argument about sovereignty and the ultimate resort to fight against wars that become “a form of rule” “Multitude’ argues: “The power over life and death the sovereign exercises becomes useless when life itself is negated in the struggle to challenge sovereignty….”
In its conclusion the book believes the future of democracy requires “a new science whose first agenda must be the destruction of sovereignty in favor of democracy.” But it warns this new universal democracy “must not end up as another form of sovereignty or tyranny” (as happened after the French and Russian revolutions.)
‘Multitude’ does not spell out the road map to this new global system but argues the prerequisites for dramatic changes are already in place:
“The extraordinary accumulation of grievances and reform proposals must at some point be transformed by a strong event, a radical insurrectional demand. We can already recognize that today time is split between a present that is already dead and a future that is already living – and the yawning abyss between them is becoming enormous. In time, an event will thrust us like an arrow into that living future…….”
ends
