(1) These points raise interesting questions. I think that the multitude is a trans-historical yet radically contextual concept, meaning that in a Spinozian sense bodies/subjectitivities are perpetually so many forces of combination, decomposition, and production. This view affirms the multitude as always already an immanent potentiality that insofar as it stands in opposition to the order of property tends toward the common (think back to the historical delineation they make in the chapter from Empire “Two Europes Two Modernities” between transcendental orders and the forces of immanence). This contingent and radically plural understanding of the multitude does not mean it cannot be historicized insofar as we understand historicization as a mapping of conditions of possibility. Here, Hardt and Negri take stock of given productive forces and make some definitive claims around the relative potential of social transformation in the contemporary moment. Thus I do not see their intervention as a re-affirmation of forgone social movements/perspectives of the common, nor a negation of latent possibilities of the common in alternative political-economic paradigms such as in state socialism. Finally, while they locate within contemporary regimes of production partially realized material elements and ontologies of the common, this does not mean that they are claiming egalitarian social transformation shares a determined relationship in the present.

(2) Again, I don’t think that it is global capitalism per se that determines their analysis of social transformation, it just so happens that we live within its circuits and this has produced a particular set of productive economic and social co-ordinates which both enable and constrain the possibilities for the articulation of a democracy of the multitude. Their problem with Heidegger/Agamben is that these theorists pose a conception of being and power entirely as negation and thus fail to adequately apprehend the immanent affirmative power of bodies in composition within one another—this isn’t to say that social formations always tend toward the construction of the common but that the potential is always present for individual and collective agency.

(3) Yes! It appears that while Hardt and Negri extract from Foucault a concept of biopolitics that recognizes the necessity of freedom and resistance to all power relations, this does not mean that events of freedom as they tend toward democratic social transformation do not require strategic thinking, organizing, and action. In other words, the biopolitical event as it enacts democratic futures is an accumulation of strategic action.