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In “Why Work on Rights? Citizenship, Welfare and Property in Empire and Beyond” [Theory & Event, 8:4, 2005], Scott Michaelsen and Scott Cutler Shershow argue that Hardt’s and Negri’s proposition of the three rights - the rights to global citizenship, guaranteed income and reappropriation of the means of production - which are said to give expression to the political power and teleology of the multitude at the conclusion of Empire is, as they put it, fundamentally flawed.

Although the authors claim to be responding to what they also argue are the radically and fundamentally new conditions of labor in postmodernity, their concluding proposals finally do no more than recapitulate an entire tradition in which socio-political rights of every kind remain contingent upon an individual’s willingness and ability to work, to earn, and to produce.

I’m more than sympathetic to this critique and its conditions, but let me elaborate it in the specific terms that Michaelsen and Shershow offer. Hardt and Negri’s endorsement of a political project founded on the figure of the citizen ignores the very features of citizenship itself, and particularly its contractarian aspects.

Firstly, that the “formulations of rights always entail some norm and form of reciprocity, some particular-to-open-ended idea of duty or obligation which operates as the hinge for citizenship’s exclusivity”. There are, then, both conditions and exceptions. Secondly, that it is “the work-ethic proper [which] serves as a crucial criterion for judging individual citizens” - they recount the criteria of US immigration law, and I would add that the same goes for the relation between migration policy and the work ethic in AU.

Their third point is perhaps more interesting, insofar as it tightens the relation between the first two:

[…] the very form of citizenship is itself commonly understood as a Work. The bare minimum of the moral contract is the labor that is the citizen, and this labor takes the form of a certain moral elevation, education, or self-working which makes one qualified or fit for any sort of citizenship — and which therefore makes possible every other kind of social exclusion.

[… They therefore] project a citizen oriented toward productive labor and the amassing of capital rather than toward bourgeois identity and its constant companion, the work-ethic; but, in either case, judgments will have to made regarding who has met the threshold of “creation” and therefore who is entitled to the “rewards”. They also appear to completely reaffirm the moral contract (the self-fashioning labor of the citizen in the form of a certain Work), since their figure of citizenship involves a “man” who must be “squared,” or multiplied with itself, and must be further elevated through “love of the community,” in order to reach the threshold of liberation. The exclusivity of this formulation should be obvious: what happens to those beings who cannot achieve homohomo, or cannot shoulder the burden of such massively productive, capital-generating labor? And, even more so, what will happen to those who may refuse to seek such a threshold? (Here, perhaps, one should remember the old Situationist slogan: “Never work.”)

Finally, what is to be done with those who, on entirely different grounds, refuse the fusion of the multitude into what Hardt and Negri call its “singularity” in the name of difference or particularity, however conceived? As Jacques Derrida has noted: “[C]ommunio is a word for military formation and is a kissing cousin of the word ‘munitions’: to have a communio is to be fortified on all sides, to build a ‘common’ (com) ‘defense’ (munis), as when a wall is put up around the city to keep the stranger or the foreigner out. The self-protective closure of ‘community,’ then, would be just about the opposite of … preparation for the incoming of the other, ‘open’ and ‘porous’ to the other… A ‘universal community’ excluding no one is a contradiction in terms; communities always have an inside and an outside” (Caputo 108).

But, then, I was already persuaded, and in similar terms: Derrida’s bewildered response to Negri’s adherence to an ontology; the rather social democratic terms of Empire’s argument that proceeds by lamenting the collapse of the Westphalian system as an “ontological lack” which the multitude might fill; the teleology and, worse still, the vanguardism; Nancy (rather than Negri) on community, and so on.

They conclude with this remark, which I think also explains something of why Empire has so quickly passed its use-by date:

Despite their own claim to the contrary, their program leaves nothing “unforeseeable,” and, indeed, no room for “events” at all.

And isn’t this another way to approach the question of the multitude/s that Jon and Nate have been turning over?