// Reflections on the book launch: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri ‘Assembly’ | Westminster

University, London, 12th October 2017

von Alessio Kolioulis and Rahel Süß

The
book launch of Assembly at Westminster University was something in between a meeting and a seminar. Several local activists attended alongside academics and the discussion with Hardt (Negri was absent for health reasons) was as stimulating as the presentation. Hardt confessed right at the beginning that the book serves as an excuse to meet people and discuss the status of

movements across the globe.

In fact, with the rise of the movements following the world financial crisis, the

idea for the book Assembly gravitates around one question: Why aren’t

social movements able to achieve lasting change and create a new, more democratic and just society, despite being the manifestation of the needs and

desires of so many?

The
book Assembly tries to answer this question by calling for an inversion of strategy and tactics and for an understanding of the relationship between

strategic multitude and a tactical leadership.

How do we address the future of social movements?

Looking at how we can address the future of social movements, a critical question

raised by the authors of Assembly is: where are all the leaders gone? In

Negri and Hardt’s view, on the one hand leaders have been attacked from the outside. On the other, they have been undermined by an internal critique of centralised structures in the name of democracy. This is the case, for

instance, of the Black Lives Matter movement, a leaderless movement

which rejects an historical tendency of celebrating charismatic leaders.

According to Hardt and Negri, both “leaderless movements” and “movements with a leadership” are incapable of long lasting structures. They are unable to make long term claims and democratic decisions. Instead of suggesting one of these two options, the authors argue that the choice between a short-lasting movement

without leaders and an undesirable leadership is false. Assembly reveals

a different horizon.

The framework of the book is underpinned by the idea that social movements can produce a lasting strategy, provided they find ways to confine leaderships to short-term tactic decisions. This inversion of the old formula by which the party leads the movement according to its strategy, is now reversed. The multitude is capable of giving its own political directions. However, a different question becomes critical: how do we restrict leadership to local and

short-term tactics?

With this in mind, the authors introduce two terms: tactical leadership and strategic multitude. With tactical leadership, Hardt and Negri indicate that leadership should be restricted to a tactical role, a form of leadership that is limited to short-term action and tied to specific occasions. A strategic multitude is a movement which is able to organise new forms of cooperation and

fight against the extraction of the commons.

Improving the capacity of movements’ strategic
decision-making

In order to improve the capacity of social movements in making decisions, Hardt and Negri trace four strategic areas which define the structure of the book: social production, the extractive nature of capital, the entrepreneurship of the multitude and the commons. From a strategic perspective, we can look at

these areas as four different levels of analysis.

Social Production

The first area corresponds to the analysis of the relations of production. What is social production? In Hardt and Negri’s view, an example of social production is the type of work that hospice workers carry out in care homes. These workers are employed to provide care and humanity to an ageing population. They provide affects and sustain links with family members. In other words, their main task is to offer emotional labour. Care workers are thus the example of a tendency which we can observe analysing the current phase of production. Factories still exists, but if we look at how finance extract profits, it is clear that is now increasingly through the extraction of affective labour, such in the case of

human activity across interactive social media.

Extractive Nature of Capital

The second strategic area that Hardt and Negri discuss is the extractive nature of

financial capital. The authors of Assembly draw a link between how

capital extracts value produced at the bottom of production and financial markets. Finance is an extractive industry that relies on the type of social production described above. Finance remains an extractive abstraction that implies a relative distance from the point of production. As Hardt brilliantly put it, gentrification is an extractive activity that relies on the care provided by people through affective labour. When a group of people produce wealth by producing social added value caring for the neighbourhood, estate markets are

the long hand of extract that affective work done.

Entrepreneurship of the Multitude

The third section of the book deals with the controversial concept of “entrepreneurship of the multitude”. The entrepreneurship of the multitude can be seen as a new form of cooperation, provided is antagonistic to the system which reproduce social injustice. At the book event, Hardt admitted that the term entrepreneurship is far from being ideal. However – he added – much of our political vocabulary and concepts are corrupted. It is up to us to produce struggles over concepts, such in the case of the term and notion of democracy, which can be seen as an object of these struggles. On this point, the fifth

issue of engagée “Becoming-Machine” contains a text

by Negri where he elaborates the question of entrepreneurship.

The Commons

The final area on which movements can improve their capacity in making strategic decisions is linked to the commons. For Hardt an Negri the common is about open access and democratic decision making, as opposed to a notion of property defined as limited access. In practical terms, political activities should be organised against the exploitation of the social production of the common and at the same time they should aim for a society of the commons, fighting for

open access and a democratic management of the commons.

The Future of Social Movements. Is Circularity the New
Strategic Horizon?

At the end of the presentation, Hardt returned to the question raised at the beginning: where are all the leaders gone? He concluded by saying that this is perhaps the wrong question to ask. We should instead

have a different line of inquiry: where can people find the power to organise?

In this brief conclusive reflection, we would like to make one suggestion following this question. If we understand Hardt and Negri correctly, social movements should locate and organise the enterprises of the multitude, because these represent a space where new struggles can emerge. But if vertical

and horizontal strategies can´t work today, how can the multitude be strategic?

Looking at David Harvey’s analysis of Marx’s totality, we can observe that the three volumes of capital correspond to different moments of paradigms and anti-capitalist struggles. These are 1) the Fordist struggles in the sphere of production characterised by vertical strategies, and 2) the Post-Fordist struggles in the sphere of reproduction characterised by the horizontal strategies of the sixties and seventies. We could say that 3) within financial capitalism, where the sphere of distribution is central to the dynamics of capitalist re-configurations, our struggles and our strategies

should be “circular”.

By circular we mean that, if Hardt and Negri are correct, the future of social movements could be determined by a two-fold strategy. One, organising those who are at the forefront of that cooperation from below that characterise social production. Two, by radicalising democratic decision-making processes, power and leaders will circulate, taking and giving up tactical positions. This is what we could call – after the vertical and horizontal strategies of the twentieth century – a circular horizon. This evocative image – inspired by the Mandevillian cover – is

an open question to be discussed and developed.

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