Commonwealth: Notes to Part 1
Preface
In the opening pages of Commonwealth Hardt and Negri claim that the book represents an attempt to “articulate an ethical project, an ethics of democratic political action within and against Empire” (vii). Reiterating their position in Empire and Multitude, they argue that despite the insecurities, conflicts, and contradictions wrought by globalization there is no longer any space “outside” the new global capitalist order. For better or worse, globalization has created a common world. Because there is no longer an outside, creating more sustainable and democratic futures requires acting in this world through new collective projects of self-rule and political invention. CW thus represents Hardt and Negri’s attempt to fully articulate the conditions of possibility for a global democracy of the multitude. Central to CW is the conceptual deployment of the common. By the common Hardt and Nergi refer to the material world as well as to the results of social production—ideas, knowledge, images, and affects. While neoliberal forms of rule have led to the further enclosure of the commons through new strategies of capital accumulation and privatization, Hardt and Negri assert that globalization has also created common spaces and modes of knowledge particularly in the realm of digital communication and cultural production. According to Hardt and Negri, these articulations of the common—while still captured within empire’s distinct alignments of biopolitical production—represent an immanent potentiality for realizing an alternative democratic project: the “becoming-Prince of the multitude”.