Theory & Event

In the final section of Empire, their monumental recent study of the postmodern global economy, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri try to articulate in a new way the “potential political power” of the vast group of “exploited” and “subjugated” social subjects they call the Multitude (393). Such power finds its concrete expression, according to the authors, in three “rights”; 1) the right to global citizenship; 2) the right to a “social wage” or guaranteed income; and 3) the right to “reappropriation of the means of production” (406). Such rights are no more, and no less, than the practical embodiment of what Negri elsewhere calls a new “post-deconstructive” ontology, grounded in the essential creativity of the productive social subject (Negri, “The Specter’s Smile” 12). The first two of these proposed rights may also be said to articulate, in their most general form, the full domain of traditional civil and economic rights. At stake here, in other words, would be an attempt to guarantee to all social subjects, without conditions or exceptions, both citizenship (inclusion within the juridico-political order) and welfare (what Franklin Roosevelt famously calls a “freedom from want”). The third right, by contrast, reiterates the fundamental aspiration of classical Marxism, and corresponds precisely to that essential characteristic of the Multitude — its productivity — which allows it to serve, in the overall argument of the book, as a symmetrical counterforce to Empire itself. Hardt and Negri’s three rights thus encompass (and perhaps transcend) both familiar liberal approaches to social welfare and the full utopian audacity of the Marxist tradition, and so represent, the authors suggest, the very telos of all (past or present) struggles for political liberation.

No reader otherwise sympathetic to a progressive politics of any variety could fail to be generally sympathetic to these proposals. In this essay, however, we will suggest that Hardt and Negri’s specific case for these three rights, and also the whole philosophic program that underlies that case, is fundamentally flawed. Although the authors claim to be responding to what they also argue are the radically and fundamentally new conditions of labor in postmodernity, their concluding proposals finally do no more than recapitulate an entire tradition in which socio-political rights of every kind remain contingent upon an individual’s willingness and ability to work, to earn, and to produce. A thorough critique of this persistent habit of thought is required, we argue, before any conceivable schedule of rights, including this one, can be either rigorously thought or practically realized.