Quotes from book
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire is a book by post-marxist philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, published in 2004. It is the second installment of a "trilogy" also comprising Empire and Commonwealth .

Antonio Negri photo

“Immaterial labor has become hegemonic in qualitative terms and has imposed a tendency on other forms of labor and society itself. Immaterial labor, in other words, is today in the same position that industrial labor was 150 years ago, when it accounted for only a small fraction of global production and was concentrated in a small part of the world but nonetheless exerted hegemony over all other forms of production. Just as in that pgase all forms of labor and society itself had to industrialize, today, labor and society have to informationalize, become intelligent, become communicative, become affective.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

109
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“The contradictory conceptual couple, identity and difference, is not the adequate framework for understanding the organization of the multitude. Instead we are a multiplicity of singular forms of life and at the same time share a common global existence. The anthropology of the multitude is an anthropology of singularity and commonality.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

127
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“Material production - the production, for example, or cars, televisions, clothing, and food - creates the means of social life. … Immaterial production, by contrast, including the production of ideas, knowledges, communication, cooperation, and affective relations, tends to create not the means of social life but social life itself.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

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Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“Contemporary capitalist production is characterized by a series of passages that name different faces of the same shift: from the hegemony of industrial labor to that of immaterial labor, from Fordism to post-Fordism, and from the modern to the postmodern.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“affective labor is biopolitical production in that it directly produces social relationships and forms of life. … When affective production becomes part of waged labor it can be experienced as extremely alienating: I am selling my ability to make human relationships, something extremely intimate, at the command of the client and the boss.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

110-111
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“In the same way that the figure of the peasant tends to disappear, so too does the figure of the industrial worker, the service industry worker and all other separate categories.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

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Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“We have to construct the figure of a new David, the multitude as champion of asymmetrical combat, immaterial workers who became a new kind of combatants, cosmopolitan bricoleurs of resistance and cooperation.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

50
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“the hegemony of immaterial labor does, though, tend to change the conditions of work. Consider, for example, the transformation of the working day in the immaterial paradigm, that is the increasingly indefinite division between work time and leisure time. In the industrial paradigm workers produced almost exlusively during the hours in the factory. When production is aimed at solving a problem, however, or creating and idea or a relationship, work time tends to expand to entire time of life. And idea or image comes to you not only in the office but also in the shower or in your dreams.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

111-112
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“Even when labor is subjugated by capital it always necessarily maintains its own autonomy, and this ever more clearly true today with respect to the new immaterial, cooperative and collaborative forms of labor. This relationship is not isolated to the economic terrain but, as we will argue later, spills over into the biopolitical terrain of society as a hole, including military conflicts. In any case, we should recognize here that even in asymmetrical conflicts victory in terms of complete domination is not possible. All that can be achieved is a provisional and limited maintenance of control and order that must constantly be policed and preserved. Counterinsurgency is a full-time job.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

54
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“[Michel Foucault] argues, prison resembles the factory, which resembles the school, which resembles the barracks, which resembles the hospital and so forth. They all share a common form that Foucault links to the disciplinary paradigm. Today, by contrast, we see network everywhere we look.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

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Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“We share bodies with two eyes, ten fingers, ten toes; we share life on this earth; we share capitalist regimes of production and exploitation; we share common dreams of a better future.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

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Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“In the contemporary economy, however, and with the labor relations of post-Fordism, mobility increasingly defines the labor market as a whole, and all categories are tending toward the condition of mobility and cultural mixture common to the migrant. **133”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“the question to ask, in other, is not "What is the multitude?" but rather "What can the multitude become?" … common condition, of course, does not mean sameness or unity, but it does require that no differences of nature or kind divide the multitude.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

(105-106)
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“The contemporary scene of labor and production, we will explain, is being transformed under the hegemony of immaterial labor, that is, labor that produces immaterial products, suchs as information, knoledges, ideas, images, relationships, and affects. This does not mean that there is no more industrial working class whose calloused hands toil with machines or that there ae no more agricultural workers who till the soil. It does not even mean that the numbers of such workers have decreased globally. In fact, workers involved primarily in immaterial production are a small minority of the gloval whole. What it means, rather, is that the qualities and characteristics of immaterial production are tending to transform the other forms of labor and indeed society as a whole. Some of these new characteristics are decidedly unwelcome. When our ideas and affects, or emotions, are put to work, for insance, and when they thus become subject in a way to the command of the boss, we often experience new and intense forms of violation or alienation. Furthermore, the contractual and material conditions of immaterial labor that tend to spread to the entire labor market are making the position of labor in general more precarious. The is one tendency, for example, in various forms of immaterial labor to blur the distinction between work time and nonwork time, extending the working day indefinietly to fill all of life, and another tendency for immaterial labor to function without stable long-term contracts, and thus to adopt the precarious position of becoming flexible (to accomplish several tasks) and mobile (to move continually among locations). […] The production of ideas, knowledges, and affects, for example, does not merely create means by which society is formed and maintained; such immaterial labor also directly produces social relationships. […] immaterial labor tends to take the social form of network based on communication.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

65-66
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“Multitude is a class concept. … Class is determined by class struggle. There are, of course, in infinite number of ways that humans can be grouped into classes - hair color, blood type, and so forth - but the classes that matter are those defined by the lines of collective struggle. Race is just as much a political concept as economic class is in this regard. … Class is a political concept, in short, in that a class is and can only be a collectivity that stuggles in common.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

104
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“Perhaps some day soon we will have arrived at the point when we can look back with irony at the barbaric old times when in order to be free we had to keep our own brothers and sisters slaves or to be equal we were constrained to inhuman sacrifices of freedom.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“The political program of nation building in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq is one central example of the productive project of biopower and war. Nothing could be more postmodernist and antiessentialist than this notion of nation building.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“in general, the hegemony of immaterial labor tends to transform the organization of production from the linear relationships of assembly line to the innumerable and indeterminate relationships of distributed networks.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

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Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Antonio Negri photo

“The task of a theory of class is to identify the existing conditions for potential collective struggle and express them as a political proposition.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

104
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

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