Biopolitical production, the common, and a happy ending: on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Commonwealth

Abstract

Looking back at the turn of the millennium, the emergence of the new social and political movements that were commonly identified with the labels ‘anti-’ or ‘alter’-globalisation was no doubt among the central events in radical politics worldwide. Few writers were able to capture the political desires and potential expressed by these movements more effectively than Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri did in their hugely successful Empire (2000). Their latest book, Commonwealth (2009), which completes the trilogy begun by Empire and continued by Multitude (2004), intervenes in a political conjuncture marked by the decline of the forms of political subjectivity and organisation that ten years ago had lent impetus to Hardt and Negri's theoretico-political project. Is the political optimism that pervades their work still justified in the present conjuncture? Moreover, does it account for the dynamics of uneven development and the geopolitical inequalities of our contemporary world? This article provides a critical assessment of Hardt and Negri's Commonwealth that focuses on the conceptual apparatus deployed in the book, and argues for a more detailed analysis of the concrete situation.

Keywords:

• biopolitical production
• democracy
• geopolitics
• history
• immaterial labour
• multitude
• singularity
• the common