“The primary forces that have guided the history of modern resistance struggles and liberation movements, along with the most productive resis tance movements of today, we will argue, are driven at base not only by the struggle against misery and poverty but also by a profound desire for democracy-a real democracy of the rule of all by all based on relation ships of equality and freedom. This democracy is a dream created in the great revolutions of modernity but never yet realized. Today, the new characteristics of the multitude and its biopolitical productivity give powerful new avenues for pursuing that dream. This striving for democracy permeates the entire cycle of protests and demonstrations around the issues of globalization, from the dramatic events at the WTO in Seattle in 1999 to the meetings of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil…”
Recognizing the characteristics of the multitude will allow us to invert our perspective on the world. After the Darstellung, or exposition, of our current state of war, our Forschung, or research, into the nature and condi tions of the multitude, will allow us to reach a new standpoint where we can recognize the real, creative forces that are emerging with the potential to creare a new world. The great production of subjectivity of the multitude, its biopolitical capacities, its struggle against poverty, its constant striving for democracy, all coincide here with the genealogy of these resistances stretching from the early modern era to our own.
In the following sections, therefore, we will follow the genealogy of liberation struggles, from the formation of people’s armies in the great modern revolutions to guerrilla warfare and finally to contemporary forms of nerwork struggle. When we put the genealogy in morion, in faer, the changing forms of resistance will reveal three guiding principles – principles that are really embedded in history and determine its movement. The first principle that guides the genealogy will refer to the historical occasion, that is, the form of resistance that is most effective in combating a specific form of power. The second principle will pose a correspondence berween changing forms of resistance and the transformations of economic and social production: in each era, in other words, the model of resistance that proves to be most effective turns out to have the same form as the dominant models of economic and social production. The third principle that will emerge refers simply to democracy and freedom: each new form of resistance is aimed at addressing the undemocratic qualities of previous forms, creating a chain of ever more democratic movements. This genealogy of wars of liberation and resistance movements, finally, will lead us to see the most adequate form of organization for resistance and liberation struggles in the contemporary material and political situation.”
Michael Hardt, “Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire”