Chapter 14 : Situating Hardt and Negri

Introduction

To what extent is it possible to situate Hardt and Negri’s thought? Are they best regarded as ‘anarchists,’ ‘socialists,’ ‘communists,’ ‘Marxists,’ ‘Leninists,’ ‘post-Marxists’ or ‘post-anarchists’? Answering this question is no mere intellectual exercise. As Wittgenstein once remarked, ‘words are deeds.’[1062] On the radical Left, much blood has been spilled through those deeds, careers ended and reputations shattered. Of course, today a great deal is made of the claim that we live in ‘post-ideological’ times, ‘new times’ where ‘class struggle’ does not have the importance it once had; postmodern times, where meanings and identities are constantly subject to the contestation of ‘discourse.’ Now, while the costs of labeling are not what they once were, there are still costs. Labeling instigates a kind of ‘symbolic violence’ over discursive space. Rival ideologies are constructed as ‘straw men,’ as ‘crude,’ ‘naïve,’ as ‘elitist’ or ‘authoritarian’ and so on. This process neglects any philosophical sophistication, common ground, or indeed the interpenetration of ‘rival ideologies.’ One danger of labeling is that we move beyond healthy criticism to a desire to relegate our theoretical interlocutors to the status of the ‘other.’ Accordingly, they become an opponent we seek to dismiss, in order to give positive identity to ourselves, rather than a potential ally in the struggle against the exploitative mechanisms of global capitalism. Where labeling is also connected with the construction of orthodoxies, it can lead to what Skinner has termed a ‘mythology of coherence’ (and of incoherence) produced often by those wishing to defend the integrity of their specific ideological projects.[1063]

While seeking to avoid the excesses of such ‘symbolic violence,’ this chapter aims to locate Hardt and Negri’s work within the cross-cutting currents of modern socialism, and crucially to understand the labeling strategies which they themselves deploy in the field of revolutionary politics. Why specifically, do they find it necessary to reject the label of ‘anarchism’? Why do they make often rather cryptic reference to ‘Leninism’? What game are they playing, and why do they feel a need to play it? What are their intentions? How can we read Hardt and Negri? Antonio Negri has paid a higher price than most in the struggle against global capitalism and we can learn a great deal both from his work and activism.[1064] That said, in what follows I will subject his work — along with Michael Hardt’s — to a robust critique, drawing on Marxist, anarchist, post-Marxist, and post-anarchist thinking, so as to assess the cogency of their arguments in the context of radical politics today.

Labels and the Left

Hardt and Negri are difficult authors to situate. The immediate context in which Negri’s work emerged was the Italian autonomist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a movement in which he was one of the leading intellectuals. Autonomism has been viewed by such diverse figures as Bologna and Callincos as embodying an attempt to ‘refuse’ or ‘reject’ the rule of the Leninist party model in the context of contemporary revolutionary politics.[1065] This challenge to Leninism — perhaps in part as a result of the weakness of Italian Trotskyism — resulted in a strong libertarian anti-statist aspect in autonomist thought in general, and Negri’s thought in particular.[1066] Moreover, we see in Negri’s more recent work with Hardt, the combination of this with an emphasis on that old Marxian foe the ‘lumpenproletariat.’ Accordingly, the well-respected scholar of Marxism David McLellan, and the post-anarchist S. Newman, have each regarded Hardt and Negri as at least unacknowledged anarchists, albeit for Newman of a post-anarchist flavor.[1067]

Yet Hardt and Negri have refused the label of ‘anarchist.’ They have written: ‘No, we are not anarchists but communists.’[1068] This refusal also leads Hardt and Negri to adopt a complex response to the discourse of Leninism, one which — in contrast to Bologna — goes beyond simple ‘refusal.’ Rather, Lenin is treated as ‘the most complete representation of … the “actuality of the revolution.’”[1069] Indeed, in Empire, Hardt and Negri have written of an ‘alternative implicit in Lenin’s work: either world communist revolution or Empire’.[1070] The question to be addressed here is ‘what is the practice of these statements?’ Elsewhere, Negri has written — this time very clearly:

To me, Leninism is the price we paid for the political composition of the Italian proletariat. There was no way to talk politics other than via Leninism…. It was the class lingua franca: it could cause trouble, but you could make headway with the class (and with no one else) only by using it.[1071]

And of course, this ‘lingua franca’ is anti-anarchist to the very core. To understand this in more detail, we need to look first at the nature and practice of the ‘divide’ between anarchism and Marxism, and then how this came to feed in to the discourse of Marxism-Leninism. This divide is not illusory. There are some very real differences between anarchist and Marxist approaches. But such differences are heightened as problematic when used as textual ‘orthodoxy’ to establish the ‘party line.’ To achieve this, a ‘return’ to Marx was often viewed as the only ‘scientific’ way forward. This ‘return’ inevitably focuses on Marx’s hostile polemics with Proudhon and Bakunin, and hence a clear critical line comes do be drawn between Marxism and anarchism. Yet it must be pointed out — albeit briefly — that these polemics were complex in nature. Thus, while it is the case that Marx came to criticize the ‘petty-bourgeois’ and ‘non-dialectical’ character of Proudhon’s work,[1072] he had earlier regarded Proudhon’s 1840 text What Is Property? as a great scientific advance.[1073] And, while Marx wrote of Bakunin that: ‘He does not understand a thing about social revolution, only the political phrases about it; its economic conditions do not exist for him,’[1074] he had also considered there to be many advances in Bakunin’s early economic materialism. And Bakunin for his part had written of Marx that he ‘advanced and proved the incontrovertible truth, confirmed by the entire past and present history of human society, nations and states, that economic fact has always preceded legal and political right.’[1075]

Indeed, we might comment that both Marx and Bakunin opposed the institution of private property; both were committed to the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist mode of production; both considered economic conflict — specifically class struggle — to be a fundamental driving force of historical development; both thought capitalist states to be rooted in systems of class domination, and should therefore be abolished; and both explicitly stressed proletarian self-emancipation as a necessary feature of the forthcoming social revolution.[1076]

Yet, a clear textual basis for the construction of the official state ideology of Marxism-Leninism came to be viewed as self-evident. Consider how in his 1901 Thesis on Anarchism and Socialism, Lenin wrote that: ‘Anarchism, in the course of the 35 to 40 years (Bakunin and the International, 1860) of its existence (and with Stirner included, in the course of many more years) has produced nothing but general platitudes against exploitation.’[1077] For Lenin, anarchism failed to understand the ‘causes’ of this exploitation. In 1905, he wrote that: ‘The philosophy of the anarchists is bourgeois philosophy turned inside out. Their individualistic theories and their individualistic ideal are the very opposite of socialism.’[1078] Similarly, in 1912, at the Italian Socialist Congress, he claimed that the working-class movement was ‘rapidly ridding itself of the sickness … of anarchism.’[1079]

The words of Lenin can be situated here in the context of the centralist theory of organization that he had articulated in texts such as What Is to Be Done? (1902), and One Step Forwards, Two Steps Backwards (1904).[1080] Here Lenin, as is well known, put forward the controversial thesis — building on the arguments of Kautsky — that the working classes, left to their own devices, would never reach beyond ‘trade union consciousness.’ Political consciousness came to the class from outside the economic struggle, the vehicle of revolutionary theory being party intellectuals.

Although anarchists have often seized on this to explain the deviations of the Soviet system, a few words of caution must be made. First, it would be a mistake to argue that there is a simple continuity between Leninism and Stalinism. After all in 1922 Lenin stated in his ‘Last Testament’ that ‘Comrade Stalin […] has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.’[1081] Second — a fact ignored by the Stalinists — Lenin’s view was amenable to change. Bloody Sunday in 1905 had helped to mobilize the masses against the Czarist state. And in The State and Revolution (written between August and September of 1917), Lenin had stated the case for a more open form of organizational structure, and indeed for the rapid abolition of the state.[1082]

Of course post-revolutionary history led to different outcomes. The ‘new dawn’ after October 1917 was rapidly to pass, as the political and ideological differences between the communists and the anarchists came to be accentuated. The Leninist attempt to establish hegemony over the revolutionary movement led to suppression of alternative voices.

This brings us back to Negri’s point about the ‘price’ of Leninism — for one price was undoubtedly his (and Hardt’s) refusal of the label anarchism. Intellectually, too, the price was the dishonesty — however ‘necessary’ — of dogma. Indeed, it would be a distortion to think of Lenin’s view of revolutionary organization as being hegemonic, even among communists. Trotsky and others had very different views. Revolutionary Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg voiced significant concerns about the type of centralism advocated by Lenin, questioning specifically its suitability even for ‘Russian conditions.’[1083] This is not to say that Luxemburg was a ‘naïve’ spontaneist; certainly, she had faith in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, but this was a spontaneity in a definite material context, and with a clear and democratic organizational structure, serving to militate against the possible excesses of centralized party structures.

Negri’s ‘orthodoxy’ is far from the usual kind; there is no ‘application’ of Lenin’s theory. Rather, Negri claims to rethink the ‘contemporaneity’ of Lenin, a Leninism for the epoch of global capitalism, a Lenin whose analysis shifts in accordance with the specificity of the context in which he is embedded, but who nevertheless enables us to ‘think’ revolutionary subjectivity. Indeed, Negri’s account of Lenin involves periodization. Thus we have the Lenin of 1890–1900, of 1900–1910 and of 1910–1917.[1084] In the first period, Lenin focuses on providing an analysis of the ‘determinate social formation’; here his aim is to understand the specificity of working-class composition — that is the ‘actual standpoint’ of the working class. The goal of political economy here is to be judged through its practical-political efficacy, or its contribution to the constituent power of the proletariat. In the second period, characterized by What Is to Be Done?, Lenin was concerned with ‘organizational’ questions. In the third period Lenin wrote of the need to eradicate the bourgeois state. We see this most clearly in Lenin’s The State and Revolution.

So, this problematic periodization of Lenin, which we have just outlined, needs to be thought in terms of the contemporaneity of Lenin — a Lenin for the realities of global capitalism, a Lenin against Empire. As early as 1973, Negri wrote against the crude application of the Leninist party form to the contemporary context, insisting that the political composition of the working class had now been substantially modified.[1085] And in a recent article, Negri claims that we must understand Lenin’s ‘biopolitics’; we need, he claims, to grasp ‘new revolutionary corporealities, the powerful base of the production of subjectivity…,’ ‘of the communist ‘general intellect.’ We need to ‘move into the realm of Lenin beyond Lenin.’[1086]

Thus we arrive at an important question: to what extent is Hardt and Negri’s somewhat unconventional (post-)Leninist communism actually antianarchist in a way that is comparable with the anti-anarchism of orthodox ‘Marxism-Leninism’? Here we need to explore in greater detail what Hardt and Negri have to say about anarchism and communism.

Anarchism and communism

Negri writes in Reflections on Empire: ‘[I]t is a pity that the anarchist conception has never been attentive to the issue of homology with the state […] so that it produces in its concept of insurrection and in that of the abolition of the state a revolutionary imprint that is fiercely empty of alternative proposals and full of resentment.’[1087] Earlier in the same text, he criticizes the anarchists for refusing ‘to define a time or space as privileged moments of uprising; they live in the chaos of the world of exploitation, illustrating destructively its institutions, but failing to put forward a positive strategy of transformation.’[1088]

There is no explicit engagement with the ‘texts’ of anarchism here; no discussion of the wide range of subtle and not so subtle differences in the anarchist ‘canon.’ And there is most definitely no attempt to explore the common ground between Marx and his ‘classical’ anarchist contemporaries such as Bakunin. Instead we have an opposition to a Leninist (indeed Stalinist) construction of anarchism, which enables Hardt and Negri to maintain their communist credentials, and thus — perhaps strategically — to distract their more orthodox comrades from what is in many ways an approach which resonates theoretically with themes present both in ‘classical’ as well as ‘post’-anarchism.

So, as we have seen, Hardt and Negri view themselves not as anarchists but as communists, communists who have seen ‘how much repression and destruction of humanity has been wrought by liberal and socialist big government.’[1089] New cooperative ‘circuits’ have however generated radical possibilities. Hardt and Negri insist how:

Today productivity, wealth and the creation of social surpluses take the form of cooperative interactivity through linguistic, communicational, and affective networks. In the expression of its own creative energies, immaterial labor thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous elementary communism.[1090]

This is a communism based in love and communality, and ‘irrepressible lightness and joy’, a communism rendered possible by the information age and the communication networks instigated therein.[1091]

Some of both Hardt and Negri’s recent writings are of interest to us here. In a collection of essays responding to the work of Alain Badiou, the authors argue for what we might term an anti-statist understanding of communism. Of course, a usual argument put forward by liberal capitalist and anarchist opponents of communism is that it is statist, and as such serves to undermine the freedom of the individual. Both Hardt and Negri develop a challenging rereading of this line of thought. For them, communism is opposed to ‘state socialism’ (which might be equated with ‘actually existing socialism’). In a way which shows something of the rhetorical flourish of Giddens’s ‘Third Way,’[1092] Hardt writes that: ‘We need to explore another possibility: neither the private property of capitalism nor the public property of socialism but the common in communism.’[1093] And Negri writes:

Being communist means being against the State. The State is the force that organizes, always normally yet always exceptionally, the relations that constitute capital and discipline the conflicts between capitalists and the proletarian labor force.[1094]

State socialism according to this argument is akin to a type of state capitalism. Public ownership is state ownership — alienated ownership — which operates against ‘the common.’ As such the constitutive power of proletarian labor is alienated, indeed neutralized.[1095]

Thus we have a move from a type of strategic (post-)Leninism, to a strong opposition to actually existing state socialism, and embrace of the ‘common’ in communism. In making the case for this anti-state vision of communism, the rejection of anarchism continues. For, Negri writes: ‘… there is no revolution without organization […] there still is no rational design that invests and involves the moments of rupture with the power of organization.’[1096]

Some critical points need to be both emphasized and re-emphasized here. Hardt and Negri’s self-identification as anti-anarchists is based on a misrepresentation of anarchism and hence a sectarianism which undercuts their critique of capitalism; this problem is exacerbated when we turn to their critique of socialism. Hardt and Negri’s characterization of socialism is in some ways more fitting for an author such as Phillip Blond, than for authors so deeply embedded in progressive radical political struggle.[1097] But what possible purpose can such anti-socialism have in the struggle against capitalism? For one thing, does socialism really undercut the constitutive power of the proletariat? Maybe so with certain forms of what used to be termed ‘actually existing socialism,’ and aspects of European social democracy. But it must also be acknowledged that socialism was — and still is — a product of mass struggle, a struggle often against a laissez faire form of capitalism that has been quite happy to see workers starve in the name of liberal ‘freedoms.’ It was a system which pushed for the reduction of the working day, the abolition of child labor, the creation of free public education and health care — all developments resisted by the bourgeoisie, cutting as it did into capitalist valorization and the production of surplus value.

Accordingly, an effective anti-capitalist counter-hegemony must oppose such sectarian lines of reasoning. It must engage honestly and widely with the revolutionary Left, drawing on the rich history of emancipatory struggle therein. The political ‘purpose’ which such labeling once served no longer resonates.

A ‘postmodern’ politics?

But what of the understanding of politics which Hardt and Negri propose? This is a politics which results from the shift from modernity to postmodernity, a new politics grounded in the realities of globalization. But how cogent is their account?

In Empire, Hardt and Negri write: ‘The passage to Empire emerges from the twilight of modern sovereignty […] It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers.’[1098] The modernist understanding of ‘sovereignty,’ the ‘nation state’ and the ‘people,’ come to be challenged. Thus Negri insists: ‘Today, on the contrary, it is the crisis of the nation state as induced by globalization that the general crisis of political categories of modernity manifests, opening thought to the relation between Empire and multitudes.’[1099]

For Hardt and Negri, ‘classical’ anarchists, socialists and Marxists alike are trapped inside a ‘modernist’ problematic, where power is understood only in relation to its univocal, or at best dualistic, exercise. For ‘classical’ anarchists this is the exercise of repressive state power over essentially free individuals. For Marxists, this is a causally determinant economic power, which produces a particular state form and which serves both to justify and maintain the exploitative status quo. And for ‘socialists’ this is a state which can be seized for revolutionaries and for reformists, transformed in order to defend and promote a progressive conception of the public — put in the kind of language which Hardt might use — a ‘state of love.’ As we have already noted, for Hardt and Negri, the erosion of the very logic of the nation state is making (technologically) real the communist utopia, as a new conception of the postmodern ‘commons’ emerges in the context of globalization. It is to this theme that I now turn.

Hardt and Negri radicalize the Foucauldian language of biopower, and harness it to the cause of radical politics in a context of ‘postmodernity.’ Foucault wrote of biopower’s ‘influence on life’ that it ‘endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.’[1100] Hardt and Negri write of biopower as ‘a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it.’[1101] To this extent, the authors are on the same theoretical terrain as post-anarchism and post-Marxism. Take Saul Newman’s claim that:

We can no longer imagine a clear conceptual distinction between society and the state, between humanity and power, as power is reproduced through everyday relationships and practices — such as educating, healing, governing — and through a variety of social institutions …’[1102]

This is in many ways the irony of postmodern analyzes of power — that power is decentered, multivocal, but also more totalizing than it has ever been. So, for Laclau, as social closure is an ‘impossibility,’ power’s grasp is never complete, but nor are we ever outside the discourse of power relations. Following an Althusserian theme, the very subject of power is constituted in the context of power relations; as such the abstract liberal individual subject comes to be problematized. For the post-anarchist Saul Newman, power is endemic in everyday social practices, such that the liberal distinction between state and society can no-longer be sustained, while for Hardt and Negri, Empire and biopower subjugates more than a state-centered imperialism ever could.

What then of the possibility of resistance — and in particular, how does an understanding of Hardt and Negri’s view on this issue enable us to situate their thought? A key feature that unites Foucault, post-Marxism and post-anarchism is an opposition to a ‘grand narrative’ of resistance, and of emancipation. The totalizing effect of power means that all attempts to resist its subjugation will be temporary and partial. Here, much attention is given to what we might term ‘micro-practices,’ embodied perhaps most clearly in Foucault’s claim that we have to ‘create ourselves as a work of art.’[1103] Accordingly, the large projects of social transformation held up alike by Bakunin, Marx and Lenin, are looked on as at best outmoded.

Yet there are clear differences in post-Marxist and post-anarchist approaches. Where for post-anarchists such as Newman, the concern is with a non-hegemonic prefigurative politics of the ‘here and now,’ post-Marxists stress the importance of a post-Gramscian hegemonic politics which seeks to weld various complex struggles into a concrete — and always precarious — historic bloc.[1104]

But how ‘radical’ is Newman’s alternative? In some ways it is strangely conservative. Newman writes: ‘Radical transformation — and here we recall Bakunin’s “urge to destroy”, which for him was also a creative urge — should be accompanied by a sensitivity to what exists, and a desire to conserve what needs to be conserved.’[1105] Hardt and Negri are more clearly radical in the language they use. But there is no account of hegemonic politics, either in ‘statist’ or non-statist forms.[1106] Instead there is a stress on the autonomist notion of ‘refusal.’[1107] In his earlier writings, Negri provided a theorization of refusal which he at least considered to have a firm Marxian grounding — located that is in a specific and novel reading of Marx’s Grundrisse.[1108] In this reading, the autonomous and unified power of labor against capital is clearly asserted.[1109]

In what they regard as distinguishing their work from anarchism, Hardt and Negri have made the argument, in Empire and elsewhere, for a constructive ontology of resistance, a ‘refusal’ which contains the seeds of a possible ‘communist’ future. So they write: ‘[S]uch destruction only grasps the passive, negative limit of sovereign power. The positive, active limit is revealed most clearly with respect to labor and social production.’[1110] To this extent, Hardt and Negri write of the creation of ‘constellations of powerful singularities.’[1111]

Here the notion of biopolitics is important. Biopolitics rallies against the exploitive totalization of the contemporary capital form. It seeks to reincorporate a form of production which resists the imposition of the rule of ‘measure’ — a form of communal production against Empire. Hardt and Negri draw a distinction between ‘constituent’ and ‘constitutional’ power. The former is ‘an institutional form that develops a common content; it is a development of force that defends the historical progression of emancipation and liberation; it is, in short, an act of love.’[1112] The latter, on the other hand, seeks to constrain, to subjugate, to legalize. Just as there is no one site of Empire, there is no one site of (constructive) resistance to Empire. In the same way that Empire can be considered a totalizing mode of exploitation, so too resistance is everywhere. The ‘Party’ can no longer represent a unitary site of struggle. The working class are just one exploited group among many. We are all the ‘multitude.’

Stressing the complexity of these new modes of struggle, Hardt and Negri write that ‘as production becomes increasingly biopolitical […] an isolation of economic issues makes less and less sense.’[1113] A revolutionary approach must be leveled against the social bios as a whole, not at ‘the economy’ (in the limited sense) or ‘the state,’ and exploitation must be attacked in all its differential manifestations. But this for Hardt and Negri is a positive attack. So, they write: ‘We need to create weapons that are not merely destructive but are themselves forms of constituent power, weapons capable of constructing democracy and defeating the armies of Empire.’[1114]

The multitude and revolution

In this section, I interrogate further Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude, in order to assess their understanding of the form of revolutionary agency and subjectivity made possible in the context of Empire. Hardt and Negri have challenged the restrictive identification of the contemporary proletariat with wage laborers, which they associate with Marxism. Hardt and Negri write:

The exclusions of other forms of labor from the working class are based on the notion that there are differences of kind between, for example, male industrial labor and female reproductive labor, between industrial labor and peasant labor, between the employed and the unemployed, between workers and the poor.[1115]

Marx it is true provides a somewhat restricted relational understanding of the proletariat. Moreover, Ernesto Laclau has pointed out that Marx’s proletariat involves a substantial revision — indeed redefinition — of that concept. Whereas the proletariat was a ‘poor outside any stable social ascription,’[1116] it comes now to be associated with a radical and transformative conception of agency.[1117]

The proletariat, according to the definition in the Communist Manifesto, are wage laborers, and the bourgeoisie owners of the means of production, and purchasers of labor. Moreover, they were laborers capable of their own emancipation from the constraints of the capitalist economy, despite the forms of fetishism therein.[1118] Of course the paradigmatic and most advanced mode of wage labor in Marx’s time was industrial, and a discussion of industrial wage labor comprises much of the content of his later analyzes of political economy. More recent Marxists,[1119] motivated by a political desire to conform to certain party orthodoxies, have maintained that a necessary condition for wage labor to be proletarian is that it produces so-called ‘material’ commodities. For Poulantzas, ‘Non-material’ white-collar labor was largely ‘petty bourgeois’ in character.[1120] But Marx explicitly opposed such an approach; it did not matter for him whether you worked in a ‘sausage factory’ or a ‘teaching factory.’ Proletarian labor was defined simply as ‘wage labor,’ labor which politically may be more or less ‘advanced.’[1121]

To return to the theme of exclusion, let us take the ‘unpaid’ laborers to which Hardt and Negri refer. Marx uses the term ‘lumpenproletariat’ to refer to aspects of this category, for in constructing a theory of the revolutionary proletariat, it was necessary for Marx to exclude as ‘other,’ all that which he considered to be ‘reactionary’/’counter-revolutionary.’ The lumpenproletariat exist outside of the binary opposition between exploiter and exploited, conceived as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. They were the class that was not a class, to the extent that, as Hayes has noted: ‘They were a class only in so far as they were lumped together by their last contact with the dialectic, their common exclusion from the relations of production.’[1122] So too, Ernesto Laclau writes that: ‘In order to maintain its credentials as an “insider” of the main line of historical development, however, the proletariat had to be strictly differentiated from the absolute “outsider”: the lumpenproletariat.’[1123]

We can look in more detail at Marx and Engels’ work to see how they go about constructing this understanding of the outsider. Engels wrote: ‘The lumpenproletariat, this scum of depraved element from all classes, with headquarters in the big cities, is the worst of all possible allies. This rabble is absolutely venal and absolutely brazen.’[1124] In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels referred to the lumpenproletariat as ‘the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the layers of old society.’[1125] For Marx, key aspects of the lumpenproletariat sat outside the (directly) exploitative mechanisms of the capitalist system. They were the parasitic groupings. They were the reactionary forces likely set back the historical cause of the proletariat. But they were more than (permanently) unemployed workers. They were the ‘organ grinders,’ the ‘criminals,’ the ‘prostitutes.’ Marx even discusses the finance aristocracy in this context, writing that ‘where money, filth and blood commingle. The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society.’[1126]

Bakunin’s work represented a contemporary and immediate challenge to Marx and Engels’ views on the lumpenproletariat. But his challenge was based on an understanding of a further ‘exclusion.’ The forces of reaction were for Bakunin to be found not in the ‘lumpenproletariat,’ but within Marx’s hallowed ‘advanced’ sections of the proletariat. Accordingly, Bakunin turned his back on the industrially ‘advanced’ proletariat, and embraced the ‘lumpenproletariat,’ the ‘flower’ of the proletariat. ‘By the flower of the proletariat I mean precisely that eternal “meat” for governments, that great rabble of people ordinarily designated by Messrs. Marx and Engels by the phrase at once picturesque and contemptuous of “lumpenproletariat”’[1127]

Both accounts attract the criticism of post-Marxists and post-anarchists. Laclau considers that Marx’s concept of the lumpenproletariat represents the boundary of his theory of class struggle and historical materialism, a tension between an ‘economic essentialism’ and a recognition of the discursive character of political identity. Marx considered class identity as constructed through the internal antagonisms of the mode of production. Yet the discourse of proletarian identity is the result of an a ‘antagonism’ external to the social ‘totality,’ what Laclau would term a ‘constitutive outside,’ this ‘other,’ itself being the product of a contradictory discursive operation of Marxism. To this extent, all political identities result from antagonistic discursive processes, rather than the unfolding of the historical or economic dialectic.[1128] But if this is so, Bakunin’s view is hardly an ‘advance’ on the one put forward by Marx. Bakunin explicitly stated — despite a tendency in his work to reify the significance of state forms — that he shared with Marx a belief in the economic determinants of the historical process. If, as Bakunin argued, the lumpenproletariat was the ‘flower of the proletariat,’ this flower would seem spontaneously to bloom outside of the operation of politics.

Newman has leveled the charge of determinism against Marx and Bakunin. He writes that: ‘Bakunin’s political thought can be seen as a scientific-materialist philosophy combined with a dialectical view of historical development.’[1129] Yet Bakunin receives a far better treatment from Newman than does Marx. This is in part because Bakunin’s ‘essentialism’ is mitigated by the negative character of his dialectics — a dialectics where there is a thesis, anti-thesis, but no synthesis. This is a dialectics of opposition to politics, a dialectics of destruction, a dialectics of refusal.[1130]

As we have seen, the theme of refusal runs through Hardt and Negri’s understanding of the ‘multitude.’ Let us explore this multitude in more detail. Hardt and Negri propose a conception of revolutionary agency which is more fitting to the ‘realities’ of contemporary global capitalism in the information age, or the period of ‘Empire.’ In place of ‘traditional’ manual labor Hardt and Negri point to the increasing significance of what they term ‘immaterial labor.’ Thus they write of ‘the communicative labor of industrial production that has newly become linked in informational networks, the interactive labor of symbolic analysis and problem solving, and the labor of the production and manipulation of affects.’[1131] These are broad categories, uniting the labor of high tech and service industry, for example, the flight attendant’s ‘service with a smile.’ For Hardt and Negri — and to this extent they follow the theorists of the ‘information age’ such as Bell and Castells[1132] — these modes of labor are generated through an unfolding logic of the global capitalist economic system.

Their view, then, is not that there are no determinant processes which generate an ontological resistance to capitalism but, rather, that the ontological understanding produced by Marxism has been displaced; the need is for a new understanding of revolutionary agency in a contemporary ‘postmodern’ context. It is again worth making a comparison here with Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxism. Laclau and Mouffe write: ‘Only if we renounce any epistemological prerogative based on the ontologically privileged position of a universal class will it be possible seriously to discuss the present degree of validity of the Marxist categories. At this point we should state quite plainly that we are now situated on post-marxist terrain.’[1133] Having made this assertion, Laclau and Mouffe find no agent with which to replace the working class. In contrast, as we have seen, when Hardt and Negri bid farewell to the ‘old working class’ they say hello to the new proletariat — the ‘multitude.’ However, this notion of the multitude is difficult to grasp. At once, it becomes ‘the class of those who refuse the rule of capital.’[1134] They maintain that:

The concept rests […] on the claim that there is no political priority among the forms of labor: all forms of labor are today socially productive, they produce in common, and share too a common potential to resist the domination of capital […] The multitude gives the concept of the proletariat its fullest definition as all those who labor and produce under the rule of capital.[1135]

The ‘immanence’ of the multitude brings with it a certain political potentiality, a potentiality of common collaboration.

So, the multitude are the exploited who nevertheless have the potential power to refuse the rule of capital. Let us look a little more at some of those Hardt and Negri place under this banner. The traditional working class are part of the multitude. Those who perform domestic labor — women in the household — are part of the multitude. The health care worker is part of the multitude. The agricultural worker in the developing country is part of the multitude. The sex worker is part of the multitude. The ‘poor’ are part of the multitude. The unemployed are part of the multitude. For, as Hardt and Negri write: ‘[j]ust as social production takes place today equally inside and outside the factory walls, so too it takes place equally inside and outside the wage relationship.’[1136] At one point, Hardt and Negri insist that: ‘All of the multitude is productive and all of it is poor.’[1137] And elsewhere Hardt and Negri write: ‘The poor […] refers not to those who have nothing but to the wide multiplicity of all those who are inserted into the mechanisms of social production regardless of social order or property.’[1138]

Whereas for Hardt and Negri the use of the term lumpenproletariat by Marxists served to ‘demonize’ the poor, ‘only the poor has the ability to renew being.’[1139] As the authors put it: ‘these classes are in fact included in social production […] the poor are not merely victims but powerful agents […] they are part of the circuits of social and biopolitical production.’[1140] The ‘lumpenproletariat’ are not a reactionary ‘other’ to the proletariat, but rather a constituent element of it.

Leaving aside the issue of whether the ‘poor’ really can be regarded as having such transformative potential,[1141] it remains difficult to see how the multitude can be regarded as a site of possible transformation of the social bios as a whole. That is, without a hegemonic project bringing together the unemployed, sex workers, service workers, material and manual laborers, as well as the lumpenproletariat, immigrants, and indigenous residents, it is difficult to see how a meaningful challenge to the power of the capitalist state can be mounted. Indeed, the fact that Hardt and Negri reject engagement with the state form means that their prefigurative politics of resistance — as with post-anarchism — will always be constrained.

Problems are exacerbated further by some of the approaches to refusal which Hardt and Negri have suggested. These seem to owe more to a postmodern understanding of identity politics, than to an effective politics of anti-capitalism. Accordingly, they write of the subversion of ‘conventional norms of corporeal and sexual relations between and within genders.’[1142] They enthuse about the subversion implied by ‘dressing in drag.’ Indeed, ‘Bodies themselves transform and mutate to create new posthuman bodies.’[1143] Speaking about these types of approaches in general, the resoundingly modernist Marxist Terry Eagleton writes of how: ‘Socialism has lost out to sado-masochism. Among the students of culture, the body is an immensely fashionable topic, but it is usually the erotic body, not the famished one. There is a keen interest in coupling bodies, but not in laboring ones.’[1144]

That said, there is at least for Hardt and Negri a stress on exploitation as a key determinant of revolutionary capacity, setting their work apart from the more extreme excesses of postmodern understandings of politics. However, the lack of analytical precision at the heart of the category of the multitude does throw into doubt the idea that Hardt and Negri’s work really does represent an advance on traditional Marxian categories. Indeed, the rich tradition of Marxist class analysis has attempted to interrogate in detail — and through a rich theoretical and empirical analysis — the revolutionary potential created in the context of particular modes of exploitation, and social relations.[1145] For Hardt and Negri, if we are all part of the multitude, there is no scope at all for class analysis.

Conclusion

The task of locating Hardt and Negri’s thought is far from straightforward. Nevertheless, a number of provisional conclusions can be drawn. First, Negri’s rereading of Lenin is both strategic and far from orthodox. In going ‘beyond’ Lenin, we see a Leninist basis to Hardt and Negri’s anti-anarchist communism, and therefore how Hardt and Negri’s polemical approach might be situated. Yet, second, the account which Hardt and Negri give of communism, particularly as this relates to the opposition to ‘socialism’ in their recent work, is to say the least curious. How can two authors so embedded in the radical tradition hold such disappointing views of socialism, its history, and its advances? What game are they playing? Third, despite their preoccupation with the theme of exploitation, it seems that when it comes to ‘politics,’ the authors are closer to their anarchist straw man than they would like. They claim that anarchism lacks strategic awareness, yet they too fail to articulate a conception of revolutionary strategy. Rather, they see in the multitude the immanent possibility of spontaneous revolutionary activity, an activity without center and therefore without ‘authority,’ without ‘identity.’ Unfortunately, this is activity without direction. Of course, we might finally regard Hardt and Negri’s displacement of the problematic and ontological centrality of the working class as situating them close to the post-Marxist end of the spectrum. This is an interpretation further reinforced by their radicalization of the Foucauldian conception of biopower. Yet, at least for the post-Marxists, Hardt and Negri’s multitude fails to take account of how political identity is a ‘discursive’ product, a product of hegemony. Perhaps then they are post-anarchists? However we choose to label their thought, Hardt and Negri’s go a long way towards subverting many of the labels which have done so much to carve up the space of radical politics. The realities of contemporary global capitalism do necessitate revisiting some of these labels, if radical resistance to exploitation in all its forms is to be possible.

Acknowledgments

This idea for this chapter initially emerged from a discussion of Hardt and Negri’s thought with Professor David McLellan, a discussion for which I am grateful. An early version of the chapter was presented at the Manchester Workshops in Political Thought, Manchester Metropolitan University, September 2010. I would like to thank all those who attended for their comments — and particularly Benjamin Franks for making me think of the historical relationship between Marxism and anarchism in a different way. I would also like to thank the editors of this volume for their exceptionally challenging but also generously constructive comments. Any errors and omissions remain my own.