Multiplicity, totality and politics

Abstract

"The Seattle protests have opened up the possibility of a politics of multiplicity. The success of Negri and Hardt’s book Multitude,1 is surely linked to this direction that it indicated, a direction indicated, though not unambiguously : to discard the concept of ‘the people’ as a category that presupposes and aspires to the “one”, while rejecting at the same time, a Marxist foundation of this passage. Should we understand Marxism as a philosophy of the multitude? Is the concept of class a category of multiplicity? For Paolo Virno, the concept of class is without a doubt synonymous with the multitude.2 For Toni Negri, the concept of the multitude must reactualize the Marxist project of class struggle in such a way that it become possible to affirm: “the multitude is a class concept”. However, the action of political forces and trade-unions who claim to represent Marxism remind us that the categories of class (but also of capital, work, etc.) are ontological categories, and not only socio-economic ones, which function and make sense only in relation to a “totality”. These concepts imply modes of action that always privilege the “all” over multiplicity, and universality over singularity. The Western political tradition is constituted as a politics of totality and universality. Even when Marxism wanted to be a radical critique, it was unable to create the theoretical and practical conditions to escape this logic. On the contrary, it has often, although not to say always, increased this aspiration for the “all” and the universa