Current Affairs: When Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire was first published in 2000, it created quite a stir. New York bookshops could not restock the shelves fast enough and Amazon couldn't ship to eager buyers in their promised 24 hours.
This is quite a remarkable feat for a book of political theory. Empire theorised globalisation in the wake of the Seattle protests and pre-September 11th, and explained the new world order. This new overarching order had no official centre of administration, but the imperial masters were the powerful nations (most notably the US), multinational corporations and global institutions such as the WTO and the IMF. Since late 2001, the actions of the Empire in Iraq and elsewhere have only served to strengthen Hardt and Negri's thesis - the undemocratic nature of this power, its depth of influence and geographic reach of command.
Multitude is presented as a continuation of this analysis, but with a message of hope. Now, in more detail, we get the other face of globalisation, which, according to the authors, could allow us create for the first time a truly peaceful and universal democracy. The "multitude" represents a "living alternative that grows within the Empire", a new source of political power. Using the internet as an analogy, it is argued that globalisation has created not just the macro-powers but also a new "networked community" that can unite in a new form of resistance.
The book is at its best when it describes the problems of our current world order, with its global tendency to war. In previous wars between nation states, freedoms were restricted for the duration of the conflict. Today a continuous "war on terror" allows the rhetoric of war to profoundly erode our democracy and also allows states to subvert international law. The shadow of nuclear obliteration adds to a new concept of state "biopower" where military might combines with social, economic, political, psychological and ideological control.
In seeking a counterforce to this power, the authors turn to a Marxist analysis of counter insurgency, and argue we have arrived at a new point in the evolution of resistance movements. The hegemony of industrial workers in the class struggle has been replaced by "immaterial labour", which provides services, information, ideas, images, relationships and effects rather than physical units of production. Its use of communication, social relations and co-operation means that such immaterial labour adds to what the authors call "the common". The poor and the unpaid are included in this expanding spiral relationship of shared productivity.
In contrast, the existing economic order reduces and destroys "the common" in a quest for ownership and control. Private property, if not theft, has at least made us stupid and one-sided, and denigrates all forms of being for the simple sense of having. The collective creativeness within immaterial labour allows the multitude to provide what the authors describe as a "biopolitical" force to resist the "biopower".
In going into greater lengths to define the concept of multitude, the book loses its way. Hardt and Negri are essentially repackaging Marx. The authors maintain that no matter which way they looked at the new world, it became increasingly clear that Marx had trodden this path before. However, the analytical extrapolations do not always convince. In trying to squeeze into a corset of orthodox revolutionary thinking, the logical steps seem to become more convoluted and the language more academic and less accessible.
What saves the book is the search in the closing sections for clues as to how a genuine new democracy might evolve: how we need a new "magna carta" to establish democratic rights for global citizens in a multilateral-ordered world. For inspiration they look at the ongoing rebellion by the Zapatista movement in Mexico, and at the global justice protest movement that evolved in Seattle, Genoa and in the protests against the Iraq war. Two years on from the last of those big protests, (this book was first published in the US last August ), with Bush sitting comfortably back in the White House, I wonder if the authors' faith in such protest movements may be slightly dented. A war against war will not be easily won.
It is a pity that the authors give mixed signals in the book on whether violent actions are appropriate in support of the revolutionary causes they clearly espouse. They claim the book to be a work of philosophy rather than a manifesto for political action. As such, it requires a keen attention from the reader to relate to the wide array of abstractions that the book contains. Having taken what I would describe as a pragmatic materialist line in promoting concepts such the artificiality of nature and the basis of the human condition being our general productive capacity, (we are creatures of "habit" rather than of some deep inner self), it is interesting that in the very last paragraph the authors turn to the political power of "love" as the key to the historical progression of emancipation and liberation. It is a thought that will surely make even the most hardened revolutionary blush.
Eamon Ryan is a Green Party TD for Dublin South
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire By Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Hamish Hamilton, 448pp. £20