Political and International Approaches

Political and International Approaches

Negri’s Multitude and Resistance; Implications for Political Thought and Action

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
Poriya Chehardehi 1
Seyed Mohsen Alavipour 2
1 Faculty of Economic and Political Sciences. Shahid Beheshti University. Tehran. Iran
2 Faculty of Political Studies, International Relations and Law, Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies (IHCS), Tehran, Iran
10.48308/piaj.2026.242767.1823
Abstract
Introduction: Recently, resistance and its collective subject has returned to the center of political thought: Classical models of subjectivity and struggle – from the working class to the vanguard party – no longer account for new configurations of power and conflict, making the question “Who is the subject of resistance today, and how is it organized?” decisive. Drawing on Italian workerist Marxism, a Spinozist account of power and the work of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Antonio Negri reformulates this question through the paired concepts of “multitude” and “resistance”. This article examines the internal, ontological relation between multitude and resistance in Negri’s thought and clarifies its crucial implications for contemporary political thought and practice.

Method: This study is an analytic–interpretive. It first reconstructs, with reference to the early Negri, his shift from traditional dialectics to a logic of antagonism and the emergence of the notions of the “social worker” and networked resistance. It then reconstructs the concepts of constituent and constituted power, absolute democracy and the multitude. In the next step, it examines the political dimension of the multitude, patterns of networked organization, counter-powers and the institutionalization of resistance. The research is based on a systematic study of Negri and Hardt’s texts, aiming at a coherent conceptual reconstruction of the relation between multitude and resistance.

Discussion and Findings: The findings show that, by replacing a logic of antagonism for dialectics, Negri recasts the relation between labour and capital as a fundamental conflict between constituent and constituted power; the multitude is the ontological configuration of the collective subject within an imminent horizon of power, a multiplicity of interwoven singularities that operate at the heart of biopolitical production and the common and bear a constituent capacity. Resistance is therefore not a merely negative reaction to domination, but the affirmative dimension of that same constituent power of the multitude, actualized through the suspension of networks of exploitation, acts of exodus and collective escape, the recomposition of social relations and the appropriation of the common. This allows for a theoretical model in which the multitude, through horizontal networks of heterogeneous movements, fluid leadership and revolutionary parallelism, becomes the effective subject of resistance and durably institutionalizes antagonism in counter-powers and common institutions.

Conclusion: On this basis, the relation between multitude and resistance in Negri’s thought can be understood as an internal, ontological one. The multitude provides the material ground and social composition of resistance, while resistance is the temporal–processual mechanism through which the constituent power of the multitude is actualized in the direction of absolute democracy. Emancipatory politics is thus no longer reducible to seizing state power and top-down planning, but unfolds in new forms of common life, networked organization, socialization of the means of production and the construction of common institutions from below. Negri’s framework thereby helps to think together the plurality of subjects, the global horizon of contemporary capitalism and the need for a durable organization of resistance, and to sketch new models of emancipatory action in an era of biopolitical production and empire.
Keywords
Negri
multitude
resistance
biopolitics
constituent power
 
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