Excellent article!

My guess is that their next book will end up looking like 
Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action.  Hardt's response 
to Doug's interview question about the reactionary elements 
in the multitude was interesting - 'they're not part of 
the multitude, only good progressive people like us are in 
the multitude'.  All they need now is an account of how 
the nice people in the multitude should communicate with 
each other, and they will be Habermas.

Again and again in Multitude they assert that the Multitude 
is an active subject, that it has common goals and that it 
is subversive of the global system.  But the commonalities 
are identified as organisational commonalities, together 
with a few common enemies - though these are very general. 
What's lacking is any political commonality, because then 
the disagreements would be obvious. So at the end of Empire 
there are some astonishingly stupid and naive proposals 
(global citizenship plus social wage) that are not linked 
to any agency that could bring them about. They're just 
tagged on as afterthoughts that won't be too controversial 
in H&N's circle.  And Multitude gets more surreal still - 
my favourite dumb proposal is the global truth commission 
to establish reparations for historic wrongs!

It is interesting that such an ambitious attempt at 
thinking through radical social change should focus so 
much on the nature of the oppositional movement rather 
than the society that they're wanting to change - it 
looks more like therapy for the participants rather 
than a challenge to the established order.

James Greenstein