Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri: Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004)

The world-renowned authors of the international best-seller “Empire” follow with an astonishing, politically energizing manifesto that argues that some of the most troubling aspects of the new world order contain the seeds of radical global social transformation.

With “Empire,” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri established themselves as visionary theoreticians of the new global order. They presented a profound new vision of a world in which the old system of nation-states has surrendered much of its hegemony to a supranational, multidimensional network of power they call empire. Empire penetrates into more aspects of life over more of the world than any traditional empire before it, and it cannot be beheaded for it is multinoded. The network is the empire and the empire is the network.

Now, in “Multitude,” Hardt and Negri offer up an inspiring vision of how the people of the world can use the structures of empire against empire itself. With the enormous intellectual depth, historical perspective, and positive, enabling spirit that are the authors’ hallmark, “Multitude” lays down in three parts a powerful case for hope. Part I, “War,” examines the darkest aspects of empire. We are at a crisis point in human affairs, when the new circuits of power have grown beyond the ability of existing circuits of political sovereignty and social justice to contain them. A mind-set of perpetual war predominates in which all wars are police actions and all police actions are wars-counterinsurgencies against the enemies of empire. In Part II, the book’s central section, “Multitude,” they explain how empire, by colonizing and interconnecting more areas of human life ever more deeply, has actuallycreated the possibility for democracy of a sort never before seen. Brought together in a multinoded commons of resistance, different groups combine and recombine in fluid new matrices of resistance. No longer the silent, oppressed “masses,” they form a multitude. Hardt and Negri argue that the accelerating integration of economic, social, political, and cultural forces into a complex network they call the biopolitical is actually the most radical step in the liberation of humankind since the Industrial Revolution broke up the old feudal order. Finally, in “Democracy,” the authors put forward their agenda for how the global multitude can form a robust biopolitical commons in which democracy can truly thrive on a global scale. Exhilarating in its ambition, range, and depth of interpretive insight, “Multitude” consolidates Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s stature as the most exciting and important political philosophers at work in the world today.

Publisher Penguin Press, 2004
ISBN 1594200246, 9781594200243
427 pages

review (Tom Nairn, London Review of Books)
review (Eric Mason, Multitudes)
review (Thomas N Hale and Anne-Marie Slaughter, openDemocracy)
review (Bruce Robbins, n+1)
review (John Giuffo, Village Voice)
review (Nicholas Spencer, Electronic Book Review)

wikipedia
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google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-27)

Maurizio Lazzarato: Por una política menor. Acontecimiento y política en las sociedades de control (2004/2006) [Spanish]

El capitalismo podría haber cambiado más rápido que sus adversarios, dejándoles siempre con una era de retraso. Éste es quizás el sentimiento que se puede llegar a tener cuando se observa cómo se repiten ciertos análisis que se reclaman desde el campo de la crítica. La emergencia de un capitalismo de la invención preocupado por la captación de la “cooperación entre cerebros” no puede dejar de tener consecuencias sobre la manera de oponerse al mismo. ¿Cómo se puede dar cuenta de conceptos como trabajo, producción, consumo, comunicación, información y cooperación asumiendo que el capitalismo ya no es un “modo de producción” sino la propia producción de mundos? ¿Cómo escapar del doble bloqueo de lo individual y lo colectivo con el que las teorías liberales y las teorías socialistas han pensado la “producción de subjetividad”? ¿Cómo pensar el conflicto ya no a partir de la contradicción dialéctica, de un dualismo de clases o de una división amigo/enemigo? Por una política menor parte de estas preguntas tratando de afrontar el reto de pensar la multiplicidad y el acontecimiento como elementos raíz de la política.

First published as Les Révolutions du capitalisme, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond/Le Seuil, Paris, 2004

Translated by Pablo Rodriguez
Publisher Traficantes de Sueños, Madrid, 2006
Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-SinObraDerivada 2.5 España
ISBN 849645312X, 978849645312X
244 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2014-8-29)

Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985–) [EN, ES, DE, CN, TR, IT]

“Now is the present crisis of left-wing thought to be understood? To what extent does it call into the question the idea of social totality that underpinned Marxism and many other socialist theories? Does the concept of hegemony imply a new logic that goes beyond the essentialism of classical Marxist thought?

These are some of the questions that this now seminal book attempts to answer. It traces the genealogy of the present crisis, from the late nineteenth-century debates on working-class unity through to the contemporary emergence of new forms of struggle, making it a classic text both for understanding the concept of hegemony and for focusing on present social struggles and their significance for democratic theory.”

Publisher Verso, London, 1985
ISBN 086091769X, 9780860917694
197 pages

Second edition
Publisher Verso, London, 2001
ISBN 1859843301, 9781859843307
198 pages

Keywords and phrases
Social Democracy, relations of production, proletariat, Rosa Luxemburg, Austro-Marxism, democratic, overdetermination, Austro-Marxist, social agents, planism, Gramscian, essentialist, trade union, dualism, capitalist, sutured, Lenin, feminism, radical democracy, social relations

Reviews: David Forgacs (Marxism Today, 1985), Stanley Aronowitz (Social Text, 1986), Alastair Davidson (Thesis Eleven, 1987), Saul Newman (Australian Rev Public Affairs, 2002), Brian Precious (Spectrezine, c.2002), John P. Clark (Social Anarchism, 2004).

Critique: Normas Geras (New Left Review, 1987, Laclau & Mouffe’s response, Geras’s response)

Wikipedia
Publisher

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (English, 1985, added on 2017-10-16)
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (English, 2nd ed., 2001, HTML, PDF, updated on 2020-10-26)
Hegemonía y estrategia socialista (Spanish, 1987, added on 2017-10-16)
Hegemonie und radikale Demokratie (German, trans. Michael Hintz and Gerd Vorwallner, 2nd ed., 1991/2000, added on 2020-10-23)
Wen hua ba quan he she hui zhu yi de zhan lue (Chinese, 1994, 22 MB, added on 2020-10-23)
Hegemonya ve Sosyalist Strateji (Turkish, trans. Ahmet Kardam, 2008, added on 2020-10-23)
Egemonia e strategia socialista (Italian, trans. Fortunato Cacciatore and Michele Filippini, 2011, added on 2020-10-23)