Wer ist die Multitude? Und wenn ja, wieviele?

Soeben in deutscher Übersetzung erschienen, läuft der Hype zum Buch schon auf vollen Touren (im englischsprachigen Raum flaut er schon wieder ab). Bei einer Lesung in der Berliner Volksbühne zu beinahe nachtschlafener Zeit füllten etwa 600 Menschen den Theatersaal bis auf den letzten Platz aus, und die Jungle World feiert Empire als Dauerthema.
Auch auf indymedia-Seiten in spanischer und italienischer Sprache läuft die Debatte. Das Buch wird von einigen übermütig als neues "Kommunistisches Manifest" gefeiert, und der letzte Satz des Buches lautet: "Dies ist die unwiderstehliche Leichtigkeit und Freude kommunistisch zu sein". Leider ist das Buch sehr teuer (und zu dick?); hoffentlich erscheint bald eine Taschenbuchausgabe. Ein Anarchist empfahl in einer Rezension, den Anfang und den Schluß zu lesen sowie das Intermezzo, das den Übergang erklärt. Die Multitude selbst wird im Gegensatz zur detaillierten Analyse des Empire im Buch nur wenig beschrieben, denn das Original erschien vor den WTO-Protesten in Seattle 1999. In einem Interview mit Telepolis bezeichnet Co-Autor Michael Hardt die Globalisierungsproteste von Seattle bis Genua als die besten Beispiele für die Multitude. "Da geht es uns um ein soziales Subjekt, das sich immer in der Vielheit begreift und nicht auf eine Einheitsstruktur reduzieren lässt. Es bleibt immer eine Pluralität, aber eine, die auch gemeinsam handeln kann."
Die Verschiedenheit bleibt immer bestehen, Entscheidungen werden kollektiv getroffen, die AktivistInnen organisieren sich in Bezugsgruppen ohne Repräsentanz/ VertreterInnen. Klar klappt das nicht immer auf Anhieb (siehe kritische Nachbetrachtungen zu Barcelona), denn noch ist die Bewegung im Aufbau begriffen, aber viel weiter als 1994 ist die "Interkontinentale der Hoffnung" schon.
Und vielleicht ist die Europäische Consulta ja eine Möglichkeit, daß die Menge untereinander ins Gespräch kommt?

Hier ein Auszug vom Schluß des Buches:

"MILITANT

In the postmodern era, as the figure of the people dissolves, the militant is the one who best expresses the life of the multitude: the agent of biopolitical production and resistance against Empire. When we speak of the militant, we are not thinking of anything like the sad, ascetic agent of the Third International whose soul was deeply permeated by Soviet state reason, the same way the will of the pope was embedded in the hearts of the knights of the Society of Jesus. We are thinking of nothing like that and of no one who acts on the basis of duty and discipline, who pretends his or her actions are deduced from an ideal plan. We are referring, on the contrary, to something more like the communist and liberatory combatants of the twentieth-century revolutions, the intellectuals who were persecuted and exiled in the course of anti-fascist struggles, the republicans of the Spanish civil war and the European resistance movements, and the freedom fighters of all the anticolonial and anti-imperialist wars. A prototypical example of this revolutionary figure is the militant agitator of the Industrial Workers of the World. The Wobbly constructed associations among working people from below, through continuous agitation, and while organizing them gave rise to utopian thought and revolutionary knowledge. The militant was the fundamental actor of the "long march" of the emancipation of labor from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, the creative singularity of that gigantic collective movement that was working-class struggle.

Across this long period, the activity of the militant consisted, first of all, in practices of resistance in the factory and in society against capitalist exploitation. It consisted also, through and beyond resistance, in the collective construction and exercise of a counterpower capable of destructuring the power of capitalism and opposing it with an alternative program of government. In opposition to the cynicism of the bourgeoisie, to monetary alienation, to the expropriation of life, to the exploitation of labor, to the colonization of the affects, and so on, the militant organized the struggle. Insurrection was the proud emblem of the militant. This militant was repeatedly martyred in the tragic history of communist struggles. Sometimes, but not often, the normal structures of the rights state were sufficient for the repressive tasks required to destroy the counterpower. When they were not sufficient, however, the fascists and the white guards of state terror, or rather the black mafias in the service of "democratic" capitalisms, were invited to lend a hand to reinforce the legal repressive structures.

Today, after so many capitalist victories, after socialist hopes have withered in disillusionment, and after capitalist violence against labor has been solidified under the name of ultra-liberalism, why is it that instances of militancy still arise, why have resistances deepened, and why does struggle continually reemerge with new vigor? We should say right away that this new militancy does not simply repeat the organizational formulas of the old revolutionary working class. Today the militant cannot even pretend to be a representative, even of the fundamental human needs of the exploited. Revolutionary political militancy today, on the contrary, must rediscover what has always been its proper form: not representational but constituent activity. Militancy today is a positive, constructive, and innovative activity. This is the form in which we and all those who revolt against the rule of capital recognize ourselves as militants today. Militants resist imperial command in a creative way. In other words, resistance is linked immediately with a constitutive investment in the biopolitical realm and to the formation of cooperative apparatuses of production and community. Here is the strong novelty of militancy today: it repeats the virtues of insurrectional action of two hundred years of subversive experience, but at the same time it is linked to a new world, a world that knows no outside. It knows only an inside, a vital and ineluctable participation in the set of social structures, with no possibility of transcending them. This inside is the productive cooperation of mass intellectuality and affective networks, the productivity of postmodern biopolitics. This militancy makes resistance into counterpower and makes rebellion into a project of love.

There is an ancient legend that might serve to illuminate the future life of communist militancy: that of Saint Francis of Assisi. Consider his work. To denounce the poverty of the multitude he adopted that common condition and discovered there the ontological power of a new society. The communist militant does the same, identifying in the common condition of the multitude its enormous wealth. Francis in opposition to nascent capitalism refused every instrumental discipline, and in opposition to the mortification of the flesh (in poverty and in the constituted order) he posed a joyous life, including all of being and nature, the animals, sister moon, brother sun, the birds of the field, the poor and exploited humans, together against the will of power and corruption. Once again in postmodernity we find ourselves in Francis's situation, posing against the misery of power the joy of being. This is a revolution that no power will control - because biopower and communism, cooperation and revolution remain together, in love, simplicity, and also innocence. This is the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist."

Empire als ascii-Text:  http://textz.com/index.php3?text=hardt%2Bnegri%2Bempire
Rezensionen und Seminarbericht (Rainer Rilling):  http://www.rosalux.de/Einzel/empire

Wer ist eigentlich die Multitude?  http://www.jungle-world.com/_2002/14/02a.htm

Zu wenig Konflikt. Das Social Forum und die Politik der Multitude, Michael Hardt (Subtropen #11/03 - März 2002):  http://www.jungle-world.com/_2002/11/sub08a.htm

Die Globalisierer blockieren die Globalisierung: Interview mit dem heimlichen Revolutionär Michael Hardt, Co-Autor des Buchs "Empire", das sich zur Bibel linker Protestbewegungen mausert (Telepolis):  http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/buch/12167/1.html

Nachbetrachtungen zu Barcelona:  http://www.indymedia.de/2002/03/18598.html
Europäische Consulta:  http://www.indymedia.de/2002/03/17483.html