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Notebook 2 reframes Ida B Wells as a thinker of the multitude. In her unfinished autobiography Crusade for Justice, Wells sets aside her image as the maverick opposing lynching singlehandedly. Her autobiography grounds her intellectual and activist legacy in galvanizing collective opposition to racism, sexual violence, and class exploitation, with lynching serving as the microcosm of these horrors across the South and a newly imperial United States. This chapter reinterprets Wells’s canonical pamphlets from the 1890s and 1900s through her autobiography’s viewpoint. This notebook also challenges today’s common-sense view that racism is the by-product of “one bad apple” who can be converted to a less racist view by their victims. Lynching involves a collective reinforcing its superiority through informal and formal institutional channels. Only another collective force can counter it. Wells does not find that agency in “the people”—those who are already recognized as having rights—but in the multitude, that complicated mass at once empowering and destabilizing the State. Finally, this chapter challenges leftist romanticizations of the multitude by showing how it can express itself in mass acts of disinformation and terror and the collective pursuit of truth and justice, when guilt and fear are overcome.

Economic value, despite its mathematical appearance, is a kind of social power arising from the collective belief in a monetary object. By creating a common interest, the desire for money, value brings formerly isolated individuals together. A currency amounts at bottom to a promise of liquidity—hence the importance of confidence and trust in commercial affairs. The phenomenon of credit is examined with reference to Simmel, and the common emotion it presupposes is interpreted in terms of Spinoza's concept of power of the multitude. Durkheim's analysis of shared belief is important for identifying the link with religion. The liberal conception of money is criticized, and further evidence of the connection with religion found in the historical genesis of currencies and so-called monetary miracles. The idea of a fundamental value—of a “true” or “correct” price—no longer has any place in economic theory because it has been detached from price.

This chapter focuses on Antonio Negri’s turn to democratic theory in the wake of Italy’s “Long ’68.” As an activist thinker involved in the political struggles of his time, starting in the early 1970s, Negri challenged the Marxist orthodoxy’s exclusive focus on factory workers through a series of conceptual innovations, such as the “multitude,” highlighting the emancipatory potential of diverse political actors and their innovative resistance practices. Despite this crucial contribution, the chapter contends, Negri’s account, too, is haunted by the Rousseauian dream of immediacy: for Negri, insurgencies are moments of democracy because they are the immediate expressions of the multitude. And while Negri refuses to characterize such short-lived moments as failures, he still, like Rousseau, considers their transience a problem, which he tries to resolve through the cultivation of “adequate” revolutionary consciousness—a problematic move, the chapter concludes, which reproduces the antidemocratic Rousseauian tendency to turn political theory into a theory of education in Negri’s work.

Enthusiasm in Western media and the academe about the paradigm-shifting events of the Arab uprisings of 2010-2013 has been marked by notable attention to creative cultural production by Arab youth. Perhaps no single genre has received more of this attention than Arabic rap and hip hop. However, despite the political attentiveness this recent enthusiasm has displayed, most of this literature has not yet addressed how the particularities of the processes of cultural production create experiences that help define specific political bearing. I want to further this conversation by asking: how can some rap and hip hop in Arabic be understood as specific political practice? What can analyzing this cultural production reveal about the emergent forms of political belonging enacted and developed in these practices? Focusing on performatic strategies in rap concerts, I explore different uses of call and response, costuming, “warm up” and “cool down” techniques to theorize how rap performances might work to build political community, what I call here “radical belonging.”