Will the people united in cyberspace never be defeated? Reflections on the global multitude in the epoch of American Empire

This paper examines Hardt and Negri's (Empire, 2000, and Multitude, 2004) approach to the genealogy of modern resistance. It critically examines their three guiding principles for successful resistance. The first principle involves using a simple measure of efficacy regarding the specific historical situation. According to this principle every organisation must somehow grasp the possibilities offered by the current arrangement of opposing forces. The second principle requires all “forms” of political and military organization to equate with the current forms of economic and social production. According to this principle all forms of resistance movements must evolve in coordination with the evolution of economic forms. The third principle requires that democracy and freedom act as guides to the development of organizational forms of resistance. Hardt and Negri were certain that the most evolved, emblematic form of technocratic, cyberspace Empire contains “swarm intelligence” the instrument of its own destruction: “[T]he distributed networked structure provides the model for an absolutely democratic organisation that corresponds to the dominant forms of economic and social production and is also the most powerful weapon against the ruling power structure” [Hardt M, Negri A. Multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin Press; 2004, p. 88]. This paper proposes that such a sanguine appraisal of the forms and strategies of contemporary capitalism belies (or forecloses) hope for any type of resistance. The flexible, distributed “perfect union” expressed in the presumed symbiotic relationship between Empire and the Global Multitude has no clothes [see Passavant P, Dean J, editors. Empire's new clothes: reading Hardt and Negri. NewYork: Routledge; 2004] and resistance, especially the resistance involving the integration of the political and the economic, requires not integrative “swarm intelligence” but the relentless destruction of the enveloping falsifications and futile illusions of dis–embodied, virtual, networked, “global” capitalism and its uncivil appropriation of democracy and the commons.