Empire and the Multitude

Empire and the Multitude is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s account of how contemporary capitalism might make absolute democracy possible, and of the revolutionary multitude that could bring it about. Its wager is that cooperative, social production has outgrown private ownership and centralized sovereignty. The book’s critical difficulty, as this discussion frames it, is that it identifies the desired transformation more clearly than it explains how resistance becomes self-government—or how the movement it celebrates escapes the capitalist form that has helped produce it.

A theory embedded in resistance

The books are presented not simply as abstract political philosophy but as theoretical reflections on an actual global movement of anticapitalist resistance. The Seattle WTO protests, Genoa G8 summit protests, and Zapatista movement in Mexico are felt behind their arguments: the books draw energy from struggles taking place at local, regional, and global levels. That proximity is a source of their appeal, but also a limit. The difficulties of the theory are bound up with the difficulties of the movements it interprets.

Hardt and Negri give these diverse emancipatory struggles a shared political name: democracy. In their account, democracy is not a distant ideal appended to present conflicts; it is the common desire already running through them and the proposed answer to continuing conflict and war. They argue that the rise of the multitude at the heart of capitalism makes democracy possible in a new way. Earlier democracy, they contend, remained constrained by the One of sovereign state power. Absolute democracy becomes possible when the multitude can rule itself, without qualification or an external sovereign standing above it.

Immaterial labor and the common

The argument depends on a historical account of production. Marx had described highly organized corporate capitalism as already containing a form of socialization: as ownership became increasingly separated from production, its nominal owners seemed less essential. Hardt and Negri, however, regard Marx’s model as historically tied to centralized, hierarchical, mechanized industrial labor. They argue that the changing dominance of immaterial labor creates a new opening for revolutionary transformation.

Immaterial labor includes both symbolic work—the production of ideas, codes, texts, programs, and figures—and affective work involving people’s physical and emotional lives, such as the labor of doctors, babysitters, and flight attendants. Its importance is structural rather than simply quantitative: it gives contemporary production its characteristic form. What workers produce, on this account, is not only goods and services but also cooperation, communication, ways of life, and social relationships. These shared capacities constitute a common that cannot be neatly contained within private property.

The claim goes beyond saying that production has become less material. If the products of labor are social relations themselves, and the cooperation required for production is already contained in the work, then economic production directly produces social life. Hardt and Negri infer that producers could regulate the social space they collectively make, without the detour of representative democracy. The owners of production would become increasingly superfluous, while the multitude could govern its own relations. In this vision, the common produced under capitalism is both the material basis and the political possibility of absolute democracy.

The problem of capitalist form

The critique turns on a tension between Hardt and Negri’s celebration of capitalism’s dynamism and their opposition between the multitude and the sovereign One. They treat financial speculation, decentralized decision-making, mobility, flexibility, and interaction among multiple agents as signs of a productive movement that could point beyond capitalist rule. The future multitude seems, in this respect, already to be emerging within the organizational practices of contemporary capitalism; what remains is a conversion that would change what those practices are for.

But this picture risks mistaking capitalism’s own mode of self-revolutionizing for the outline of its successor. Capitalism does generate new forms of cooperation and productive power, yet it also contains them within a form organized around the appropriation of surplus-value. The question is therefore not only whether the multitude can become self-governing, but whether the capitalist form is merely an external restraint on its development or the condition that organizes that development in the first place. If the latter is true, removing an allegedly obstructive sovereign One would not by itself free an already complete multitude. The fantasy of productive movement released from its obstacle could itself reproduce capitalism’s image of endless expansion.

The discussion also questions the analogy between the multitude and a decentralized model of the psyche. In that model, decisions emerge from interactions among local agents rather than from a single central Self; psychic life is treated as an autopoietic process without a commanding center. A society in which the multitude rules itself appears to offer a political counterpart. Yet Hardt and Negri continue to describe the multitude in opposition to the One of sovereign Power, even as they locate its productive basis in capitalism. Their account thus has to explain how those two descriptions fit together: whether the One is simply imposed upon the multitude, or whether capitalist organization helps constitute the very movement it is supposed to contain.

The unresolved passage to democracy

The book’s philosophical orientation becomes especially consequential when it approaches political action. Hardt and Negri explicitly decline to provide a concrete program or to answer what should be done. The criticism is not that they owe readers a detailed empirical forecast. It is that their account still needs to determine the structure of the political transition it anticipates: how movements resisting sovereign power become a multitude that directly governs its shared social relations.

The ending of Multitude makes the gap visible. After describing resistance, global civil conflict, the corruption of imperial biopower, and the multitude’s labor, the book anticipates that accumulated grievances and proposals will at some point be transformed by a strong event and a radical insurrectional demand. But just when the account might clarify the character of that decision and the passage toward absolute democracy, it retreats from judging whether the time for such a decision is near. The result is an announced rupture whose conceptual form remains indistinct.

This hesitation matters because the alternative to taking power is itself ambiguous. Refusing to capture the existing apparatus might mean building alternative spaces outside it, as in the Zapatista strategy in Mexico; it might instead mean dismantling the apparatus so that it can no longer organize political life. Those are not interchangeable paths. Without a clearer account of the difference, direct rule by everyone risks remaining an attractive promise whose relation to existing institutions, organization, and power has not been settled. The book’s importance in this reading lies in the sharpness of its democratic wager and in the unresolved political passage on which that wager depends.