From the Multitude
Hi, I’m Ewan, and in the global society I’m the troll under the bridge sending out paper boats made from handwritten conspiracies.
In the real world I’m a social policy analyst and writer. You can see my work in a variety of publications, including The Guardian, Cosmonaut, Frontier, Tribune, History Now. ExMultitude (i.e., from the multitude) is my Substack where I’ll be writing essays that look at issues relating to education, international development, globalization, imperialism, planetary capitalism and other topics relating to the ways in which we relate to the idea of the world as a political economy. Politically I'd probably class myself very generally as a Marxist and an anarchist and what that generally means is that I see material questions as key to understanding culture and that I question the inevitability of the modern state.
If there’s a set of questions that animates this blog, it’s to what extent does, or could, a ‘global society’ truly exist? and if does, then what are the mechanisms that control it and is an alternative possible?
It’s a question that would have seemed blindingly obvious to the “globalization” cheerleaders of the 1990s and 2000s, who found a ideologically convenient starting point (the end of the USSR) to declare a new era of stability: the End of History. It was capitalism’s greatest victory, one that heralded a new world order in which economists saw their position at court elevated to a status previously held by scientists. In this new world order, GDP was the higher power of what for all intents and purposes was a planetary death cult.
On the other side was what became known in some circles as the alter-globalization movement. Their critics had painted the ‘alter’ prefix as against and thus cast the the alter movement as backwards looking primitives who wanted to reverse the great tides of humanity. Yet it was clear from the key rallying cry of that time, ‘Another World is Possible”, that this was a movement that sought an alternative form of globalization, not a rejection of Earth’s common humanity coming together.
Identifying the World Trade Organisation, the IMF, and the World Bank as the three horsemen of the apocalypse, the alter movement correctly perceived that “free trade” was creating race to the bottom economics, whereby the world’s poorest countries competed with each other to offer international corporations their soil with as few labour laws as possible.
Twenty years later, it’s difficult to say that the alter-globalisation movement was a success. It was not for a lack of ideas, for there were, and are, incredibly vibrant and exciting ideas for a counter-imaginary that came out of that movement. Still, state institutions were caught within an economic straitjacket, one that grew increasingly tighter on what was and wasn’t possible in terms of social and economic policy. An increased military alliance of Northern states, led by the USA, ensured that any state that tried to move it’s arms out of the jacket, would be dealt with, first with sanctions, then with bullets.
The alter-globalization movement not only failed in an attempt to capture the state institutions, but also to create robust alternatives. In an era where information could travel across the world at the speed of light, there were a few wins for the alternative movement but mostly losses, as social media became swiftly co-opted and corporatised. The fairtrade movement, an initiative that aimed to reduce the super-exploitation of southern labour, is perhaps emblematic here. Fairtrade works by asking consumers to pay a premium, which in turn is passed on to the labour. Where it is possible, fairtrade has reduced suffering and abject poverty, and yet it remains the tiny exception, or perhaps even a constituent part of global supply chains.
My own story intertwines somewhat with the broad strokes I have painted above. I grew up in the global north at a time when the political left was a historical phenomena and parliaments were run by an alliance of old money, capitalists and slick management types. In the early 00s, I studied Sociology at the undergraduate level and was confronted with the globalization literature. I was a punk rocker, which at that time said little about who you were, and everything about what you bought. Still, through all the songs about suburban life, there was a thin streak of rebellion that encouraged me to fall somewhat into the alter-globalization scene, reading Klein, Chomsky and even buying an ‘Another World is Possible’ patch for my backpack. Another movement reduced to consumerism.
After leaving university I became a do gooder. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but the idea of going to a poorer country to help people sounded good. ‘Voluntourism’ was, the next logical step in the backpacker circuit for people who wanted to be a tourist but differentiate themselves from the masses. You paid to have an experience volunteering in the world’s poorest countries, usually teaching English, and then could return home feeling good about yourself.
Dear reader, I was one of those types. It’s an experience that has haunted me ever since, not because it was bad, because in all truth, it was a great time and I met some wonderful people, but I cringe at the memory of who I thought I was and what I thought I was doing. I wasn’t harming anyone, and the voluntourism experience can be a good way to see a new place and support informal economies. But have no illusions, you’re not changing the world. It many ways it also perpetuates power imbalances. Put it this way, do you think if a 20 something guy from Nepal came over to the UK to teach children Nepalese he’d have an easy time of things?
I eventually found myself in Myanmar, arriving on the very year that the country, a former pariah in the West, was “opening up” to new flows of capital. I’ll probably spend quite a few articles here talking about that decade of transition that ultimately failed. From teaching rebels and soldiers at the bizarre new capital of Naypyitaw, to watching US singer songwriter Jason Mraz perform an open air concert on behalf of the embassy surrounded by trucks of freshly imported Coca Cola. It was time of immense hubris and an attitude towards development that wholly ignored the ongoing struggle for respect and autonomy of the region's many ethnic groups in favour of a centralised state negotiating wholesale resource extraction.
As a foreign teacher my role was to help grease the wheels of global capitalism at a cultural level. But over many years I gradually unlearned the arrogant assumptions I had brought with me and found myself more at odds with ‘international development’. I began working more with various brilliant civil society organisations that had been providing social services to the country’s most marginalised and realised that development ‘from below’ was not just an ideal but a concrete reality.
Towards the Multitude
The globalization we are experiencing today is not as unique as was once claimed. Cultural contact and power projection over vast distances has been part of the human story for centuries, if not longer. After all, Buddha was not born in Bangkok, nor was Mohammed from Kuala Lumpur, or Jesus born in a London stable. Still, there are unique elements to the current chronicle, in particular a capitalist core with aspirations towards becoming an overarching meta-state and technologies both material and bureaucratic that enable instant transmissions from horizon to horizon of messages that reproduce class distinctions in their various forms.
This brings us to the multitude.
Over the 20th century, constructive criticism of what some would call classical, or orthodox Marxism, had pointed out that Marx’s formula neglected those outside of formal wage labour who were nevertheless exploited under capitalist rule. Feminist theorists pointed out that the waged labour itself was a product of myriad unpaid workers in both tangible and effective ways. Radical historians also illuminated the ways in which slavery and race had been intrinsic and necessary to capital’s various primary accumulations and not simply pre-capitalist leftovers.
It was clear then, to many that the classic Marxist definition of the working class was not fit for purpose. Most associated with the works of Hardt and Negri, the multitude, then, is not simply the ‘working class’ but “all those who work under the rule of capital”. Thus the multitude’s potential in being and becoming is that it does not subordinate itself to traditional leadership of the industrial working class but looks towards common organisation and resistance among all forms of labour. T
In a conceptual tryst that consciously intended to supplant the classic Marxist couplet of capital-labour, the Multitude is Empire’s antithesis. Empire is Hardy and Negri’s most famous concept, that in very general terms described a planetary quasi-state that transcended the traditional countries.
While it built off the alter-global movements, the idea of Empire/Multitude may have, at times, run too close to the theoretical road that the new world had carved out. After all, nation-states have continued to act as the ultimate arbiters for order, and while western commentators and sociologists have spoken of a world growing closer, the fruits of global capitalism have hardly been fairly distributed, if they were distributed at all. Hardt and Negri would certainly not disagree with that, but what I'm pointing to is a tension within the left/progressive movements when it comes to imagining the global. On the one hand, if we cannot imagine the global then we are condemning ourselves to parochialism. On the other, to imagine the global as a having a equally liberating/oppressive effect on people no matter where they are in the world is to fail at solidarity before you even attempt to begin.
So while the aim of building a truly global class movement is laudable, any such movements need to fully reckon with the asymmetries of global capitalism which locates the majority of the world’s manufacturing force in the Global South while propping up the crumbling welfare states of the North with expropriated profits. It is not enough for the privileged of the North to simply say “solidarity” and wave a few banners in their city centres. They must acknowledge and engage with the power and resource differentials, not through charity, but supporting empowerment and material transfer.
The multitude is both a being and a becoming. Something that exists while simultaneously reimagining itself in a million different ways every second.
It is not a homogenous global working class, but a planetary class assemblage, a coming together of all those who labour under capital and who are ideologically labelled as ‘other’. As Tania Murray Li notes, this is no easy task, but one composed of the ‘hard work required to draw heterogeneous elements together, forge connections between them and sustain these connections in the face of tension’.
If assemblage in the capitalist world is, as defined by Aihwa Ong, an “unstable constellation shaped by interacting global forms and situated political regimes”, then the practice of birthing the multitude will also be an unstable constellation, but one that is shaped by the interacting productive forces and situated cultures of Earth. It is the intention of this blog to contribute towards this imaginary flow towards another world.
Ewan.