Multitude, Surplus, and Envy

Abstract

Can Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's notion of multitude serve as a model for resistance to global capitalism? Is not the problem, more and more acknowledged by Hardt and Negri, that today's capitalism itself already functions in the mode of multitude and of permanent self-revolutionizing? The ambiguity of the notion of multitude is only the latest example of a more general deadlock of revolutionary thought: from the Marxian “reappropriation of surplus value,” the very formula of overcoming capitalist logic remains indebted to what it wants to abolish.

Keywords:

• Capitalism
• Surplus
• Envy
• Multitude
• Karl Marx
• Antonio Negri

Notes

¹I addressed them in my Organs Without Bodies (Žižek 2003, pt. 2, chap. 3).

²This is also why Hardt and Negri's reference to Bakhtin's notion of carnival as the model for the protest movement of the multitude (they are carnivalesque not only in their form and atmosphere [theatrical performances, chants, humorous songs] but also in their noncentralized organization [Hardt and Negri 2004, 208–11]) is deeply problematic: is late capitalist social reality itself not already carnivalesque? Furthermore, is “carnival” not also the name for the obscene underside of power, from gang rapes to mass lynchings? Let us not forget that Bakhtin developed the notion of carnival in his book on Rabelais written in the 1930s, as a direct reply to the carnival of the Stalinist purges.

³For a more detailed analysis of this failure of Marx, see Žižek (1999, chaps. 3–4).

⁴See Barabasi (2003, chaps. 6, 8).

⁵Are, then, slumdwellers not to be classified as what Marx, with barely concealed contempt, dismissed as Lumpenproletariat, the degenerate “refuse” of all classes which, when politicized, as a rule serves as the support of proto-Fascist and Fascist regimes (in Marx's case, of Napoleon III)? A closer analysis should focus on the changed structural role of these “lumpen” elements under the conditions of global capitalism (especially large-scale migrations).

⁶The precise Marxian definition of the proletarian position is: substanceless subjectivity which emerges when a certain structural short-circuit occurs—not only producers exchange their products on the market, but there are producers who are forced to sell on the market not the product of their labor but directly their working force as such. It is here, through this redoubled/reflected alienation, that the surplus-object emerges: surplus-value is literally correlative to the emptied subject, it is the objectal counterpart of. This redoubled alienation means that not only “social relations appear as relations between things,” as in every market economy, but that the very core of subjectivity itself is posited as equivalent to a thing. One should be attentive here to the paradox of universalization: market economy can only become universal when working force itself is also sold on the market as a commodity. There can be no universal market economy with the majority of producers selling their products.